Taming elf 'n' safety - what's not to like?

If there is one thing that politicians should never, ever do, it is to set up a regulatory body with the ability to extend its remit indefinitely. Yet that is precisely what British parliamentarians did when they created the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) by the Health and Safety at Work Act of 1974.

The HSE soon became the epitome of "bureaucratic creep", in both meanings of the term, generating a flood of niggling regulations without the slightest regard for cost-effectiveness or even common sense, while making no statistically significant impact on work-related injury, its purported raison d'être .

It  has become the most villified and despised of all the agencies of the "nanny state", and nobody except ambulance-chasing lawyers has anything good to say about it

So it is with a song in my heart that I read in the Telegraph that the Coalition government intends to implement the recommendations of the review conducted by Lord Young, to include:

• Legal liability to be lifted from those who perform “good Samaritan” acts which, through no fault of their own, cause others a personal injury.
• Legal liability to be lifted from members of emergency services, including part-time police officers, when they have risked death or injury to save others.
• Teachers will no longer have to fill in huge numbers of “risk assessment” forms before taking pupils on trips. A simple consent form, signed by parents, will suffice.
• Except where there has been “reckless disregard”, schools will not be liable for injuries suffered by children on trips or when playing sports.
• Local councils will no longer be empowered to ban firework displays, street parties and concerts on health and safety grounds.
• The burden of complex paperwork to meet risk-assessment and other health and safety criteria will be lifted from small shops, offices and other “low-risk” workplaces.
• Lawyers who charge “success fees” in “no win, no fee” agreements will no longer be able to recover fees from defendants.

Unfortunately, regulations imposed by the EU usually contain enabling provisions that empower national agencies to define their terms of reference and extend their powers without further reference to national legislatures, and our politicians have been waving them through without proper scrutiny for decades.

With ever-greater insolence under the Blair-Brown regime, Whitehall has been using the enabling provisions to "gold plate" the regulations, with the EU catching the blame for what has been a relentless, made-in-Britain power grab by the bureaucratic oligarchy.

The HSE is low-hanging fruit. I can understand that the Coalition may shrink from the task, but they need to review every single EU regulation passed into law in order to reverse 36 years of parliamentary abdication.