Black ice and white lies

No sooner had the safety community recovered from a busy festive season banning sweets at pantos and imposing speed limits on reindeer* than it had a whole new challenge to contend with; the snow.

It was the story that has since been dubbed “Gritgate” that particularly captured the nation's imagination. "Health and Safety rules stop street gritting" taunted the front page of the Sunday Telegraph, declaring that the professional safety body, IOSH, was warning home and business owners not to clear or grit public paths outside their properties or face getting sued.

The suggestion was that IOSH had warned clearing snow from the pavement could mean you were liable if you consequently left black ice and someone slipped and fell, making it better to do nothing at all. Similar stories ran in several other national papers.

But a quick examination of the facts exposed the warning as being little more than a white lie and it turned out that IOSH had issued no such guidance (see full story right). The safety body set about putting the record straight, stories were corrected or withdrawn and the media got a taste of the fact that if they're stretching the truth when it comes to health & safety they are increasingly treading on thin ice.

As is the case with much of health & safety, whether to and how to grit in cold weather isn't a decision that's black or white, so a useful debate on how to best approach the task would have been well received. Ill-researched articles which left the nation in a state of paralysis about what to do next were not. What we can hope is that the correction and retraction of these stories signal that the determination of the safety community to counter them is starting to pay off.

Aside from the army of safety organisations who are ready to speak out against any misrepresentation of the facts there are a growing number of individuals within the blog and Twitterspheres who are picking up on cases where journalists are being economical with the truth. The battle to get a fairer representation of health & safety in the media is far from won but at least these stories might be starting to look less like easy pickings.

Moving on to things which are helpful, there is a growing consensus that one way of improving perceptions of health and safety is to get more people involved in the process. Therefore the HSE's announcement in this issue of HSM that it is launching a campaign on worker involvement is welcome news. Read all about it on page 8.

And finally, also new for 2010, in each issue of HSM the HSE is publishing the most commonly asked Q&As from the HSE Infoline, (page 74), we hope you find it useful.

Georgina Bisby
Editor, Health & Safety Matters
gbisby@western-bp.co.uk

* None of these things actually happened, see www.hse.gov.uk/myth for the real stories on health & safety myths.