PI Brief Update

Don’t worry; be happy - Helen Tinkler, BPP & Central Law Training

23/04/12. We live in anxious times. The press tell us that we are all anxiety-obsessed. We worry if something happens; we worry if it doesn’t happen and we worry if we have nothing to worry about. Couple this with over-active imaginations elasticising health and safety legislation and the law in general stretching to more and more situations which might, worryingly, give rise to an accident and you have the health and safety obsession of recent times.

Apologies – I accidentally used the word accident there. That would imply that an event has happened by chance without apparent or deliberate cause. But that harks back, some would have us believe, to an era of the stiff upper lip whereas, nowadays, cynically, as everyone knows, an “accident” means compensation because it is someone’s fault. The premise has become that, for every tree or flowering basket, there is a risk of serious head injury; for every game of conkers, goggles must be worn; for every trapeze artist, there is a hard hat; for every candy floss, there is a risk of impalement; for every footpath there is a risk of tripping and slipping into a coma...

Image ©iStockphoto.com/Eagle_373

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