Health and Safety Month: Bonkers Conkers stories, Public Relations and The Profession
During August and September 2007, we have a series of around 20 articles looking at questions around Health and Safety scare stories, how they come about, and how we can get to a point where reporting is accurate.
We have contributions from Health and Safety Officers, the Director of Communications of the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health, a Public Relations Professional and myself - the blogger hosting the conversation.
This article is an index to the series. The numbers of comments are in brackets. The most recent are at the top.
Sept 05: Warning - This Posting May Contain Nuts
Further adventures of a Danger Expert.
I don’t know about you but when I get given that little packet of peanuts on an aeroplane I expect it to contain nuts. In fact if I open it and find it doesn’t have any nuts in, I shall be a tiny bit disappointed. So just exactly why do the manufacturers find it necessary to put a warning on the side of the bag “May contain nuts”?
Sept 05: Bonkers Attitude - Time to Take Responsibility?
I found this at the Overnight Editor site. It is all about Health and Safety and Guidance Notices on packets:
Do not exceed the stated dose
a.k.a. sixty-two things inanimate objects told me to do this month.
Do not exceed the stated dose.
Do not wash with brightly-coloured clothes.
Do not dispose of in fire
Do not iron. For hire.
Always use
the correct-rated fuse.
Made in a factory where nuts are used.
Sept 02: Bonkers Attitude - Time to Take Responsibility? (2)
It’s always someone else’s fault isn’t it? Any media story about a daft claim leads to a flood of comments about how ridiculous it is, but how many of us would do exactly the same if it was us who slipped on something someone else had dropped? We all know that where there’s blame there’s a claim don’t we?
Aug 30: Sensible Safety - Dull, Dull, Dull? (0)
“Sensible”. It’s not a word that inspires the heart to beat faster is it? It reminds us of the shoes we had to wear to school and the boring kid in the class that our parents always wished we could be a bit more like. “That Rodney, he’s such a sensible boy”. My dictionary says it means “judicious, moderate and practical”. I think it just means dull, dull and dull. However on the next line it gives an alternative meaning – “aware, alive to (a thing or idea)”. Now that’s more like it.
Aug 30: Training PR practitioners in risk assessment (1)
As the general secretary of the Motor Industry Public Affairs Association (MIPAA), I develop training and workshops for our 450 members. One area that we have identified as key, especially in relation to organising launch events with journalists, is risk assessment.
Aug 28: Bonkers Compo - Myth Or Reality? (1)
Ask the man in the street – or at least the man in my office – what he thinks and he’ll tell you that compensation culture definitely exists. Ask the TUC and apparently it doesn’t. So who’s right?
Aug 28: PR perspective on Health & Safety (3)
Maybe you think that if only those PR people would do their job properly, there wouldn’t be all the media outrage about “health & safety” gone mad - and the public would have more respect for risk management.
Well, as a professional public relations consultant, I thought it would be interesting to borrow Matt’s blogging chair and provide the PR perspective.
Aug 28: Blogs which cover Health and Safety Questions: Dealing with Bonkers Conkers (0)
We have been covering the questions around “bonkers conkers” stories on this blog, here and here .
I put out a plea for some Health and Safety blogs to emerge. I have found a few options, but the coverage is currently woefully thin. Here are those I have found.
Aug 27: Off The Ropes, Onto The Safety Wire (0)
It feels a bit like one of those meetings where a group sits in a circle in some bleak church hall waiting for one of their number to begin. Finally someone braver than the rest stands up and says “Hi, my name is Not Important and I’m a health and safety professional.” So begins a week or so of ramblings from me based on nearly 20 years in the H&S profession.
Aug 21: Britblog Roundup #131 Audio Podcast (0)
This 5 minute podcast on Radio5 included a discussion on the Health and Safety stories on the Wardman Wire.
Aug 20: Britblog Roundup #131 (6)
One of the jobs of blogs is to help groups talk to each other who normally exist in separate worlds, and I’ve been causing trouble in the Health and Safety world.
On The Wardman Wire I’ve been looking at what Health and Safety Officers call “Bonkers Conkers” stories - an equivalent from the Health and Safety world of “EU outlaws bent banana” rumours.
Aug 17: Bonkers Conkers and Health and Safety: Response from the Institution of Occupational Health and Safety (5)
I have had a detailed response from the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health to my article “Do Health and Safety Professionals Get too Much of a Kicking?” I reproduce it full here.
Aug 15: Do Health and Safety Professionals Get too Much of a Kicking? (21)
Recently I have posted about how “health and safety” concerns lead to - in my view - too many urban trees being removed unnecessarily, as exemplified by this quote:
“The council says the trees are a trip hazard but as far as we can establish nobody has ever fallen over them.”
Tags: bonkers conkers, health and safety[tags]bonkers conkers, health and safety[/tags]
Article Series - Health and Safety: Bonkers Conkers
- Do Health and Safety Professionals Get too Much of a Kicking?
- Bonkers Conkers and Health and Safety: Response from the Institution of Occupational Health and Safety
- Britblog Roundup #131 Audio Podcast
- Blogs which cover Health and Safety Questions: Dealing with Bonkers Conkers
- Cartoon: Take care in the operation of technology…
- Britblog Roundup #131
- Health and Safety Month: Bonkers Conkers stories, Public Relations and The Profession
- Do not exceed the stated dose - Health and Safety series
- Health and Safety Gone Mad: Crossing Your Drive Safely
- Bonkers Books about Health and Safety
[...] 03:Health and Safety Month: Bonkers Conkers stories, Public Relations and The Profession (0) [...]
[...] here by a Health and Safety officer is also featured: This posting may contain nuts. There is now a series of about 12 postings on Health and Safety , and some more to come this [...]
[...] here by a Health and Safety officer is also featured: This posting may contain nuts. There is now a series of about 12 postings on Health and Safety , and some more to come this [...]
[...] talked a lot about conkers over the last few articles. Not the round shiny sort, but the bonkers sort. They describe stories that have become all too [...]
Just saw Author of “Playing it safe” Alan Pearce on Central news discussion programme, where he was forced to admit, while under pressure, that most of the stories regarding so called bonkers H&S laws are over blow myths, or poetic licence dreamed up by local newspaper editors. Neo cons inspired by Jeremy Clarkson and backed up by the tory blue rinse brigade…SHUT the hell up.
Hi Jimbo
>Who do you want to SHUT the hell up? Clarkson? or me?
It’s a good point - and I agree with you that they are usually myths. That’s why we did the series, and got the professional body involved.
The myths are usually down to people (Papers, bloggers) not checking facts.
>Neocons?
Clarkson’s a TV presenter who found an image that got viewers. Life is not THAT much dominated by conspiracy theories.
Are these Health & Safety stories just myths? In the past few weeks, several of the stories in “Playing it Safe” have cropped up again. We’ve seen bacon on the risk list, Islington council chopping down “risky” trees and pantomime artists banned from throwing sweets into the crowd. These are real events happening to real people. And, as I pointed out on the Central TV programme, you just couldn’t make them up. And, as it happens, I certainly did not admit that these stories are myths. The accompanying package on Central TV sourced all its stories from my book and - guess what? - they had real people in real situations, not mythical folk!
My opinion is that usual process seems to be that:
* There may be a real issue
* But it often gets blown our of all proportion, even when it has been resolved sensibly.
* Often someone who is not a real H&S person will give H&S “advice”, that is different, more sweeping and less pragmatic than that that would be given by a qualified H&S officer. Sometimes someone not qualified will try and apply a universal measure, when it is not necessary.
* The sweeping advice will then get seized on as a “good story” and promulgate everywhere under “H&S Gone Mad”, and quite often
* That will then all get blamed on H&S, even though “real H&S” did not give the advice.
So the problem may be real, but the scope may be taken far beyond the reasonable by burocratic and legal logic.
My view, anyway.
Truth is stranger than fiction. The problem is not Health & Safety as such, as I make plain at the start of “Playing it Safe”. There are three real culprits:
(1) The over-zealous Jobsworth who uses H&S as an excuse.
(2) The “Compensation Culture”. It would seem that we are not suing any more these days but the perception is out there that you can sue easily.
(3) The insurance companies who, fearing claims for compensation, raise the cost of insurance to such levels that events from the egg-and-spoon race to a bonfire party are cancelled.
So, what level of “proportion” should be applied to these stories? If a school does cancel an event because of high insurance costs, that certainly is a “news story” because it ultimately affects us all. Anyone disbelieving the stories quoted in “Playing it Safe” only has to reach for the phonebook and check for themselves as the majority of people and organisations featured are not only named but exist in reality. I am also surprised that people believe newspaper editors actually make these stories up. Having been a journalist for over 30 years, not only have I never come across an Editorial Fiction Department, but have always found the biggest problem with running a newspaper is having too much material. Any reporter under my editorship would be swiftly out on their ear if caught making up stories.
>Having been a journalist for over 30 years, not only have I never come across an Editorial Fiction Department, but have always found the biggest problem with running a newspaper is having too much material. Any reporter under my editorship would be swiftly out on their ear if caught making up stories.
It’s not “making up” as such, but exaggerating and extrapolating. The Mail and the Scotsman seem to do it regularly.
I have one story unblogged (the Cemetary Benches height requirements) that I audit trailed - I’ll blog that in detail this evening.
Matt