H&S
gets a lot of bad press, and if you have common sense then yes it does look like a lot of waste time, but the problem is that lots of people don't have common sense and with the increasing litigious society in which we live the only way to show that somebody thought of the safe way to carry out a task and showed someone else is to have a paper trail of risk assessments.

We have to do method statements and risk assessments for the Environement Agency to show we aren't going to pollute groundwater.

I know we aren't going to pollute groundwater and the actual risk is minimal, but there are cowboys out there, and also people who are genuinely unaware of how their actions may affect the environment.

So there are always going to be stories in the papers about sports days being banned and stuff, but we all know that a lot of them are plain lies, while the remainder are just bending teh truth to make an interesting sounding story.
(Bazongaloid, Tue 28 Oct 2008, 13:46, Reply)