The Health and Safety Executive has criticised schools that “hide behind non-existent” healthy and safety regulations, after a primary school was given the green light to fell a 150-year old chestnut true.
St John’s Primary School in Knaphill, Surrey, won the right to cut down the 18-metre high tree, following a meeting of Woking Borough Council’s planning committee last month when a proposed tree preservation order was rejected.
Headteacher’s claims
The committee reports show that the school’s headteacher, Sarah May, had written to the councillors, objecting to the order, partly on the grounds of health and safety.
According to the committee report, Ms May said area surrounding the tree has to be closed to the removal fallen chestnuts in order to “ensure the health and safety of the children”.
And her letter also warned leafs from the tree cause a “slip hazard if left on the ground” and bird droppings have caused “an impact on the provision for children within the play area”.
HSE comment
But commenting on the issue, a spokesperson for the HSE said: “It seems school and councils still regularly hide behind non-existent health and safety regulations to excuse all kinds of questionable decisions. “Through initiatives like Mythbusters, the public are increasingly aware that health and safety is simply used as a catch all phrase in these cases, and people who make these decisions increasingly open themselves up to ridicule.
“Here at HSE, we like to think that chestnuts have fallen from trees for millennia and leaves do indeed get wet and slippery, it is nature, and is likely continue for some time yet! However, while it is nature, it certainly isn’t health and safety, which is a set of laws designed to prevent death, serious injury and ill-health in the workplace, not eradicate any risk at all from people’s lives.”
HSE Mythbusters
The HSE’s Mythbusters Challenge Panel has been set up to assess whether sensible decisions have been made in the name of health and safety.
To contact the panel, click here: http://www.hse.gov.uk/contact/myth-busting.htm
Approaches to managing the risks associated Musculoskeletal disorders
In this episode of the Safety & Health Podcast, we hear from Matt Birtles, Principal Ergonomics Consultant at HSE’s Science and Research Centre, about the different approaches to managing the risks associated with Musculoskeletal disorders.
Matt, an ergonomics and human factors expert, shares his thoughts on why MSDs are important, the various prevalent rates across the UK, what you can do within your own organisation and the Risk Management process surrounding MSD’s.
It is quite unnerving to have counselors and teachers who clearly lack training and qualification in safety, making decisions that affect the lives of our young generation. No discussion on the environmental impact of this unnecessary action for both air quality and wildlife. Next they will declare they need shelter from the sun which the tree used to provide. Is it not the right to challenge LA decisions since the Lord Young report?
I can’t see from the article that the Head teacher sited any regulations maybe she did at the planning committee that haven’t been reported. I am concerned that the HSE are trivialising the Head Teachers risk assessment which is how I assume that she determined the risks to the children in her care from the tree, maybe the HSE can confirm that they attended the site and carried out their own risk assessment in order to bust this one open….
Get a life. This is another case of H & S being misused and belittled by public sector bigots.
From what I can see it was Councillors that made the decision, there is no mention of a discussion with council safety professionals-I worked for a LA for a number of years and regularly got asked to ‘condemn’ trees on safety grounds which unless they were in a dangerous condition (we did have a three hundred weight limb fall on to a car in a school car park) I would never do. A lot of the schools within the authority were/are members of the forest schools group actively encouraging children to get involved in woodland adventures. Without getting too political… Read more »
Surely adequate control measures would have been to regularly sweep the leaves up and clean the bird poo off the play equipment. Why not get the kids involved and get them out in the fresh air and teach them about helping out in the society, give them some exercise to combat obesity. Would have been a good opportunity to use it as a topic learning about natures circle of life and talk about why the leaves fall of the tree.