“Sorry mate, no can do, ‘Elf and safety an all that”

Tom Hoctor

An early action of the coalition government was to commission a report into the merits of health and safety legislation. This was much trumpeted by the media, and was seen as a victory for the papers that had campaigned tirelessly for common sense against the incursions of the nanny state telling people how to live their lives. When the report was published, however, it failed to see the light of day in any of the papers that are so obsessed with ‘’elf and safety’. Perhaps the reason for this was that the conclusions of the report found several interesting things about the realities of health and safety legislation, findings that tallied poorly with the media narrative.

The first thing to point out about health and safety legislation is that it is exactly the kind of thing that the trade unions fought for so long to bring about. Creating mandatory levels of safety to stop people being injured unnecessarily is desirable in and of itself. It is also a useful way of codifying standards should a tribunal be necessary. In this respect legislation is eminently sensible, protecting both employer and employee. Vaguely rational explanations of the subject are not something that one would expect to find in the papers though. This was the first thing that the report pointed out: tabloid hysteria about health and safety legislation is totally disproportionate to its application to everyday life (surely not!). A story in Richard Littlejohn’s column in the Daily Mail, for example, reported council employees applying health and safety legislation to force a blind man to pick up his guide dog’s poo. This story later proved to be untrue but few people read the corrections pages. These stories are a staple of newspapers: ‘jobs worth’ council employees bossing everyone around and snooping about business allows people to get suitably furious about perceived incursions on individual privacy.

A second and perhaps more worrying development the report found was the tendency of local councils to use ‘elf and safety’ as a justification for not providing services. Health and safety legislation was almost never the underlying reason for these cancellations. The most common factor was expense. Even things like village fêtes, or cheese-rolling spectacles costs money, and cash-strapped councils found that it was easier to blame Health and Safety than explain that actually it was rather expensive to staff and supervise all this stuff, and they didn’t much fancy footing the bill. ‘Elf and safety became convenient shorthand for these occasions.

Of course this masks something that should be a very real concern to all of us. Our councils are both falsifying the reason for not subsidising public events, and incredibly underfunded. Another potential use for this kind of smoke and mirrors tactic is when councils use it as a means to stop people getting involved in local politics. In a recent case reported in Private Eye, Oxfordshire County Council closed a staircase in order to stop people entering the council chamber and exercising their right to be involved in debates. When this didn’t work they then seated the same group as far from the councillors as possible, because there were loose video cables that presented a tripping hazard.

This is pretty disgraceful behaviour, devaluing the original purpose of health and safety legislation that David Cameron described as ‘good, straightforward legislation designed to protect people from major hazards’. Instead people view it as the advance guard of the nanny state come to take over their lives. In reality the association arises because the media wants to create a narrative that will work people into a lather.
Furthermore, the local councils want either to save large amounts of money or prevent the population from exercising their democratic rights within the framework of local politics. Crucially, even though the original purpose of Health and Safety legislation was built on a foundation of good intention it has been used as a vehicle for the manipulation of the population through local councils and the national media.