The urban fields under threat from petty officialdom

The most leaked Budget of all time will apparently include a bonfire of regulations. More than 170 meddling interferences will be scrapped, liberalised or simplified. This is mostly good news: if the triffid is not slashed it goes on spreading. But I have one suggestion for George Osborne: that he read out his doomed red tape not in Parliament but on top of the Mudchute in the Isle of Dogs. There it really matters.

For the past 35 years, a valiant group of local people have converted 50 acres of derelict land into London’s largest nature reserve and urban farm. Just a few hundred yards from the skycrapers of Canary Wharf, mounds of dockland spoil heaps and clinker banks, home to ack-ack guns in the last war, have become a true “rus in urbe”. Cows, goats, pigs and chickens roam and are tended by volunteers. Horses trot along leafy rides. Rare breeds flourish; a farmer’s market has become a high street; most enchanting of all, a flock of sheep graze a nine-acre hill within bonus-tossing distance of the South Quay towers. For thousands of East End children, this is the nearest they ever get to rural life.

The Mudchute has survived financial hardship, cuts and vandalism to run on a knife-edge budget of just over £100,000 a year. Hovering in the shadow of stupefying wealth, its staff struggle to present stock of some 180 animals to more than 90,000 visitors a year. The community supports them. Even Tower Hamlets council tolerates them and donates a modest subsidy, the lowest per acre received by any park in London. It is the big society with muddy boots.

Now, however, the Mudchute has met its match, in the shape of our old friends, health and safety officials, and their trusty co-conspirator, the VTEC variant of the E.coli bacteria. Council officers patrol the site as might guards a prison camp, peremptorily ordering school groups out of fields, sheep off grass and children not to feed animals. The Isle of Dogs Mudchute has become a practice zone for petty officialdom. The farm has been ordered to fence the hilltop so as to separate sheep and humans, thus ending the celebrated photograph of sheep with Canary Wharf in the background.

The reason given is that children might come into contact with sheep droppings occasionally found on the hill. They might transmit germs to their mouths, and might get ill. This menace is mysteriously not experienced by children who go for walks in real country. Nor is that the only menace they face. Because the paddocks are composed of spoil, the inspectors declare that minuscule levels of arsenic in the soil might get into the grass, which might get into children’s stomachs and make them ill. The paddock has been ordered shut.

In all my monitoring of risk aversion and killjoy freakery by the health and safety executive, the treatment of the Mudchute by officers enforcing its edicts and handbooks takes the biscuit. They have ordered double fences with a “nomansland” to be erected around the pens, preventing any contact between people and animals, as if goats were grizzly bears. Picnics have been banned in the paddock. The order to segregate the hillside means mowers must be contracted to cut grass that was previously held in check by the sheep.

The Mudchute’s former chairman and a local doctor, Michael Barraclough, has written to the mayor of Tower Hamlets, Lutfur Rahman, pleading for him to intervene. He points to the absurdity of keeping sheep off a hill used by dogs, foxes and birds, all of which also carry the E.coli variant. Besides, he points out, the incidence of this illness in children is exceptionally rare, and curable. Of 125 incidents reported nationwide in 2010 only 12 involved hospitalisation and only five related to farms. No one has died. The Mudchute is festooned with signs about hand-washing. It has not recorded a single illness in all its 35 years. As Barraclough points out: “There were 15 deaths in rivers last year, yet officials do not fence off rivers.”

As for the risk from arsenic poisoning, there is arsenic in every London garden and it is present in soil, not in grass. Even in soil, barrowloads of earth would have to be consumed for arsenic to be harmful. The risk from the Mudchute arsenic is so low as to be negligible — according to Barraclough, it is 20 times less than in a Cornish garden. Yet Tower Hamlets dares not curb the Taliban-style fanaticism of its health inspectors, for fear of being “liable” to health and safety prosecution should anyone get ill.

These people are plain out of hand, yet ministers seem terrified of calling them to order. Like their attack on Guy Fawkes night fires, swimming pool diving boards and small craft on the Thames, health and safety officials are a law unto themselves, elevating minimal risks into grand threats, much as the security services do “the terrorist menace” to the Olympics. It is hard to dissociate their concern from self-interest in job aggrandisement.

Health and safety officials are seeking to stamp out an experience of rural life which the rich can enjoy in the countryside but the poor only in a small corner of the capital. The logical next step will be to ban all farm visits by children everywhere and stop anyone walking on a sheep hill.