By Emma Cowing
Scotland on Sunday
GRAFFHAM, Scotland — Emergency services workers will no longer be subject to health and safety legislation in a move that could save lives.
According to comments from Lord Young of Graffham, who is heading a review of health and safety regulations for David Cameron, rules imposed on police officers, ambulance workers and firefighters are endangering the public and could be abolished.
“There have been three instances of police officers standing by watching children drown and not doing anything because of health and safety concerns,” said Lord Young. “We’ve got children dying because of health and safety. Well, I’m sorry, that is just wrong and we are going to change it.”
Lord Young said emergency services workers should no longer be covered by a law designed to protect people working in totally different situations. “If you are a policeman then you get paid for doing a job which involves risk,” he said.
“Technically speaking, firemen could say they wouldn’t go to a fire because it was too dangerous. We’ve just got to get sense back into the system.” Such a change in the law could help save lives in circumstances such as those which resulted in Ayrshire lawyer Alison Hume dying in July 2008 after falling down a disused mineshaft in Galston.
Firefighters arrived at the scene but were prevented from being lowered down to help the trapped woman because of regulations stating their equipment could only be used to rescue themselves, and not members of the public.
“Health and safety has gone mad,” her father said earlier this year after the fatal accident inquiry into the mother-of-two’s death. It concluded that she would have survived if she had received prompt medical treatment. “Bureaucracy, procedures and health and safety have made the firemen and womens’ job horrendous.”
Lord Young is due to publish his report soon and will act as the Prime Minister’s adviser during its implementation.
He said ambulance workers and paramedics should be able to take more risks.
“There was a case of a paramedic woman who wouldn’t go into a pub where somebody was dying from a heart attack, because it was a threatening environment,” he said. “I want to exclude all the emergency services from health and safety.”
But police leaders rejected Lord Young’s call for the service to be exempt from health and safety laws. Simon Reed, vice-chairman of the Police Federation, said: “Most of the difficulties that have arisen are over the interpretation of the law. That is where there should be adjustments, not making the police exempt from the law.”
The Association of Chief Police officers said it was incorrect to say police were forbidden from entering the water to rescue a drowning person.
“If you are a policeman then you get paid for doing a job which involves risk,” a spokesman said. “Health and safety is being used as an excuse for inaction.
“It would have been unthinkable 30 years ago for a policeman to stand by while somebody died. They would have become pariahs; no one would have spoken to them in the force or the community.”
Lord Young has also vowed to restore “common sense” over health and safety regulations in the office.
“Every piece of electrical equipment in an office has to be checked every five years,” he said. “There are risk-assessment officers all over the place. It’s nonsense.”
The Federation of Small Businesses agreed that current health and safety rules are too cumbersome.
The Prospect union, which represents the Health & Safety Executive’s 1,650 inspectors, scientists and other specialists, said that Lord Young had to be clear of the difference between “petty bureaucracy enacted under the label of health and safety and HSE regulation designed to prevent deaths and disease in the workplace”.
Lord Young also complained that a culture of “ambulance chasing” had grown up around accident claims.
“There are referral agencies who advertise on television saying, ‘Have you been to hospital? Do you think you have a claim?’ They sell the claim to solicitors at an auction.
“Of the money that is paid out by the health service, two thirds of it goes to the lawyers and only a third to the claimant. We’ve got to ban the ambulance-chasing.
“There was a restaurant that banned toothpicks. You think, how could it possibly ban toothpicks? But some consultant who didn’t know what he was doing was being paid a few hundred pounds to do a report and stuck ‘ban toothpicks’ at the end of it. The restaurateur feels obliged to take that stupid advice because it’s a litigious age.”
Tom Mullarkey, chief executive of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, said: “We welcome this review and hope it will get to the bottom of concerns about health and safety once and for all, considering facts as well as opinions.”
Copyright 2010 The Scotsman Publications Ltd.