Health and Safety madness!

Firstly when I first heard this story the other day I did not believe it.

Secondly it is not the Health and Safety executive who are behind the latest piece of lunacy but the private, and hopefully soon to be bankrupt, shutdown or laughed at so loudly that they disappear in shame, The British Standards Institute.

They are working on a new standard of tree inspection. That ought to raise some suspicion for a start. 6 people a year die due to falling trees or bits falling off them. I don't want to belittle those who have died but that is not a lot in the scale of things, 30 people die in a bath each year.

It seems that trees should be inspected once every 3 years.

Why? Which tress?

Do they include Bonsai trees, ones in parks or do they include ones on private land over which people have the right to roam.

At £70 per tree per inspection this is of course a good way for tree surgeons to make a killing but I can't see it saving lives. The number of trees that will be cut down will cause massive loss of carbon absorption, causing deaths and also there are the deaths caused in the process of cutting down a lot of trees.

The chilling quote I read was this one here in the Daily Mail:

'We are not suggesting that everyone goes out and buys the standard," he said. "But people who have a tree in their garden and want to understand what their duty of care is can at least get an idea of what the standard is.'

Just so that we understand what this means, they are trying to tie a standard that we as a country do not need to solve a problem we do not have to the term "duty of care".

The issue here is that if you owe someone a duty of care and your breach of that causes the death or injury of someone then you are liable under the laws of negligence.

In other words, if you have a tree, buy are standards to avoid being sued.

This is wrong, very wrong.