The tone of much of the media coverage of health and safety frustrates health and safety professionals of all types – it has been highlighted as an issue throughout responses to our call for evidence. But that alone does not mean that it is important. The key question for the review is whether these stories matter. Is there evidence that they are having an impact on the behaviour of employers or the public in a way that harms health and safety outcomes? Is the coverage undermining the confidence of society in our health and safety system? It appears that health and safety receives more attention than is given to other similar regulatory regimes. There are approximately 48,000 written articles referring to health and safety published in the UK each year. In an average month, there is three times more media coverage of health and safety than of “food safety” and “red tape” combined. Some media coverage of health and safety incidents and broader issues is serious and in-depth. Local newspapers are more likely than national ones to report accidents at the workplace, their impact on families and prosecutions of employers for health and safety violations. Radio coverage is also more likely to focus on serious issues – and explore them in greater depth. Coverage that mentions the Health and Safety Executive is more likely to be positive in tone than that of ‘health and safety’ more broadly. Nonetheless, journalists often portray health and safety in a trivial way or as either unnecessarily bureaucratic or overly complicated, especially in written articles in the national press. One example is the claim that health and safety regulators have banned conkers (or require goggles be worn to play conkers). This has been presented as an evidenced fact in many media articles but is actually a myth. The claim appears to have its real-life basis in an incident in October 2004 when the head teacher of a primary school in Carlisle bought some safety goggles for pupils to wear when they played conkers. He argued it was a “sensible” precaution to address the possibility of litigation if a child were to be injured by bits of conker getting into their eyes.
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