Save us from the safety czars

The minister for health and safety, Des Browne, should be prosecuted as a public hazard. His edict that circus artists must wear hard hats when performing aloft will lead to dozens of them falling from tightropes in hysterical laughter. Under the Brussels "temporary work at heights directive", administered under Mr Browne's aegis, any activity higher than an "average" stepladder requires a hard hat to be worn.

Terrified insurers have instructed circuses accordingly. The first to be hit by this rule are baffled members of the Moscow State Circus, now touring London and the South-East. They are not Mr Browne's patsies and are used to flying through the air without even a safety net.

They point out that trapeze artists often break arms and legs, but rarely heads. This anatomical subtlety is apparently lost on Mr Browne. His next trick will be to make highwire walkers wear plaster casts, big cats wear gumshields and clowns wear "sensible" shoes.

Mr Browne will of course claim to be unaware of the daft decisions made in his name. Modern government has lost accountability. If Tony Blair can blame underlings for decisions he does not like, why not Mr Browne? As the red tape pours forth from his quangos each day, immiserating the lives of tens of thousands of workers, Mr Browne can throw his hands up and say, "Nothing to do with me".

Yet if not with Mr Browne, where lies democratic accountability? Small wonder cynics are calling this racket "health-and-safety fascism". Nobody can call a halt. The chief operational quango is the Health and Safety Commission and its vast 4,000-strong Executive (HSE).

Nowhere on its website can I find any reference to democratic accountability, let alone to Mr Browne. Only with effort could I discover that Mr Browne is "responsible" for it within the Department of Work and Pensions.

The Commission has been engaged since the Hatfield crash in making trains intolerably slow and expensive to run, not because railways are any more dangerous but to guard its back.

It is removing from London streets that great boon to London life, the Routemaster with its open-access platform. It may yet enforce Brussels' "physical agents directive" against police motorcyclists and bus drivers for "total body vibration".

The Commission's boss, Bill Callaghan, pleaded a year ago for a moratorium on new health-and-safety regulations. Criticised as the doyen of the nanny state, he announced that he was not banning conker fights, firework parties or school adventure holidays (in which teachers have been warned by their unions not to participate).

All I can conclude is that Mr Callaghan is not in charge. He recently warned the London Ambulance Service against the risk of back injury in the "manual handling" of accident victims. He sued London's current and former police chiefs for negligently allowing a policeman to fall through a skylight when chasing a burglar.

This year has seen an unceasing flow of bureaucratic diarrhoea on health and safety. Schools have been warned not to risk threelegged races, sack races and parents' races on sports days. They have already had to stop playing cricket except in hard hats and insure themselves massively on skiing trips.

As for pool diving, this has been stopped in case a school negligently fails to put enough water in the pool first. To this level of idiocy have the safety czars reduced us.

There are now some 36,000 registered school rugby injuries in a year. Last year a pupil claimed £100,000 for loss of form after a nasty injury that, he said, deprived him of the chance one day to become a professional player. Such is the hysteria surrounding health and safety that a court duly awarded him his claim.

School rugby is doomed. Not for nothing have health and safety inspectors succeeded tax inspectors as the lepers of the public services. They impose on those with whom they deal the most vicious of "stealth taxes".

Anyone involved in voluntary service in London now groans at their approach. With the motto "there is no such thing as an accident" and a train of compensation lawyers salivating at their heels, inspectors descend like riders of doom on any public occasion.

No street festival, church roof repair or school outing is safe from their ferocious demands.

One of the things I have discovered in following this plague is that nobody is in charge. Half the above incidents will be "nothing to do with" the HSE or any minister in Parliament. Many are ascribed to Europe. Others are put down to media hysteria and a litigious populace, aided by an agreeable judiciary and avaricious insurers.

ALL these have a vested interest in making life insufferable for those running public services or charitable events. None is on the public's side in balancing cost against reasonable risk. Ministers such as Mr Browne turn a blind eye because one nasty accident could harm his image more than a thousand public benefits will help it.

As for the HSE, it was itself given a taste of its own medicine by being sued for negligence by the insurers of the Ladbroke Grove crash train. This is total madness.

The manner in which we go about our lives and businesses is permeated and polluted by over-regulation. In a democracy this means by ministers, because there is no one else to call to account.

What the HSE suggests, a court will treat as law. What it treats as law, a litigant will exploit and an insurer protect. I once thought the courts might exercise legal restraint, but that is like asking a drunk to eschew the bottle. This vicious circle is now out of hand.

The fact is, ministers are the only ones we can hold responsible. It is Mr Browne who is out to kill the circus. He should be named and shamed as such.