Now the "Health and Safety" Insanity Hits a Church

[Guilbert]

>He and his men are forbidden to change a lightbulb at the station, because they might fall off the chair and hurt themselves
>the same men who, five minutes later, might well be climbing up a hundred foot ladder and rescuing people from a burning building.

Again, they are probably covered with life insurance and so on when out fighting a fire, so if anything happens to them while fighting a fire they get a payout and a pension, or their family get some money etc.

They are probably NOT covered with insurance to change a light bulb (particularly if they are stupid enough to stand on a chair).

If they fell while changing a light bulb they could well sue the fire service, council, government or whatever.

Again, blame the lawyers not the fire service.

[Sarah Kelly]

That IS absolutely ridiculous! .. Whoever makes these bloody rules up needs shooting..!furious! x

[Sarah Kelly]

or a ) call out the fire brigade to do it, as they have had the aforementioned training needed or b) get qualified as an electrician or c) use candles in lieu of lighting, tho you well regret this if resorts in the fire brigade being called out when you hear something upstairs,only to find on investigation that your bedroom is on fire and by the time the fire brigade get you you (about 3 mins in my case- was very impressed) you"ve lost everything upstairs and your life is in ruins-ish.... Cue disbelieving looks on hunky firemans faces when, joking about your "big insurance pay out" they find out you werent insured....... oh,how we laughed....... Eventually .....

[Sam Slater]

In the particular case Steve R linked to there's no need for a five grand auto winder. If any of you actually read the article thoroughly you'd have noticed what I've already pointed out, and that's that the H&S guys only pointed out that the ladder in question was 'unsupported'; it's free-standing and not fixed to the wall in some way. I think that's fair enough. They have no problem with people climbing ladders, they just want it fixed to the wall in some way to cut the chances of it falling when some guy's at the top of it!

I don't understand how you all missed this point. Credulous readers make journalists' jobs waaaaay to easy.