Health and safety partly to blame for ‘broken society’, says PM

Prime Minister David Cameron has included the UK’s
“obsession with health and safety” in a list of social
problems contributing to the broken society he blames
for the recent rioting in some English cities.

In a speech in his Oxfordshire constituency yesterday (15 August), Cameron outlined plans to tackle the underlying causes of “the sickening acts” displayed on the streets last week.   

Describing the riots and looting as a wake-up call, he pledged that the coalition government would “fight back against the attitudes and assumptions that have brought parts of our society to this shocking state”.

As well as a security fight back, this will include reviews of current government work on schools, welfare and families, and on cultural, legal and bureaucratic problems, including the “twisting and misrepresenting of human rights” and “the obsession with health and safety that has eroded people’s willingness to act according to common sense”.

Health and safety regulations, said Cameron, had often been “twisted out of all recognition into a culture where the words ‘health and safety’ are lazily trotted out to justify all sorts of actions and regulations that damage our social fabric”.

“And as we urgently review the work we’re doing on the broken society,” he stressed, “judging whether it’s ambitious enough – I want to make it clear that there will be no holds barred… and that most definitely includes the human rights and health and safety culture.”

Speaking later yesterday afternoon, Labour leader Ed Miliband attacked Cameron for reaching shallow and superficial answers, and introducing “kneejerk gimmicks”.

He called for a “national conversation” on the causes of the riots, adding that if the government refused to set up an inquiry, he would launch his own commission.

Article from HSW