There are plenty of stories in the media along the lines of ‘health and safety gone mad’ which highlight sometimes strange and petty restrictions that are supposedly put in place by various regulatory bodies.

In fact, many of these often turn out to be urban myths and even the ones that are true are individual cases where special conditions apply. The simple fact is that because of health and safety practices in the workplace there are now far fewer accidents suffered by employees than there used to be.

Dangerous work

In the past, many jobs were quite risky and …