From an employer's viewpoint, any safety issue is a nightmare. All physical activity involves an element of risk and the Health and Safety circus, along with the spin-off training industry will never be able to eliminate every risk so the employer will always be the target of unscrupulous litigation.
The more I hear of the ever escalating mountain of regulations, the more I am convinced that Health and Safety has become a self propagating entity - regulations beget more regulations until we will all, in every walk of life, drown in them.
The individual is no longer allowed to accept responsibility for his/her own safety: in any situation we will all be required to adhere to regulations laid down by someone else.
This is attacking the problem from completely the wrong angle: we are all being viewed as incompetent to make informed decisions for ourselves, everything must be seen in the light of someone else's opinion as to how we should behave.
The result of this thinking is that no-one is actually responsible for their own mishaps. Regardless of what foolhardy or reckless actions they undertake, it isn't their fault for doing it, the fault lies with someone else for not ensuring they were given the 'proper' training for whatever specific activity resulted in the accident.
WE ARE ALL GIVEN TRAINING IN SELF PRESERVATION. It's called 'growing up' - the experiences we get through the process of advancing from the innocence of the infant to the point where, as adults, our life experiences equip us to make informed and sensible decisions regarding our personal safety. If we ignore what experience tells us and take avoidable risks which result in injury, then we have only ourselves to blame.
To put this in terms of the 'flat roof' situation:
We do not need training to teach us that falling from a flat roof is dangerous. As sensible and competent adults, we are quite capable of making the decision not to approach the edge of the roof as that increases the risk of falling off. We can also appreciate the increase in danger if there is a hurricane blowing. What we need is suggestion and advice "It might be safer if you were to attach yourself via a lanyard to a secure anchor point" etc. Having been given the advice our decision is then ours, and ours alone - we should not be required, by law, to follow that advice.
To illustrate:
Last week one of my franchisees fell in exactly the situation as being discussed here. He wanted to clean a window above a flat roof and used a ladder to access the roof. As he approached the top of the ladder the foot slid away, causing him to fall.
Now: when he joined us I gave him the benefit of my long experience in the safe use of ladders. In other words, I gave him advice. One piece of advice (amongst many others) was that before he climbed a ladder it would be sensible to test the ground with his foot, to see if it were slippery or not, and to use his own experience to decide as to suitable grounding for the ladder. You don't need to be told that setting a ladder on ice is not a good idea, or on greasy concrete, or (as in this case) on damp decking!! I gave him all the advice he needed to form decisions regarding his own safety. In other words, I trained him.
He was in full possession of all the information he needed to make his decision, but he ignored my advice, set his ladder on the decking and inevitably fell. Should that be a criminal offence?
I reminded him of what he had been told (and the exhaustive practical exercises) and said what I truly believe: EVERY FALL FROM A LADDER IS ENTIRELY THE FAULT OF THE USER. He agreed with me.
I do not believe that the above should be the subject of reams of legislation, all that does is relieves the individual of his own culpability.
As a completely different aspect of personal health and safety I think there is an element of hypocrisy in current thinking. We are under legal requirement to adhere to regulations preventing us (supposedly) from taking all sorts of risks and yet the Government turns a blind eye to one of the most destructive risks of all: Smoking.
How does deliberately inhaling lungsful of toxins and carcinogenics differ from deliberately standing on the edge of a flat roof? Either can (and in the case of smoking probably will) kill you. Why is the one ignored, while the other is treated as a heinous offence?
