An inquest took place this week into the death of a man who drowned in a lake in Gosport, Hampshire. When the emergency services arrived at the scene the man was lying face down in the water but a witness said she didn’t think he’d been there long and told the crews that if they hurried they might be able to save him. It was at this moment that the scourge of the modern age, Health and Safety, reared its ugly head.

Whilst a policeman and a paramedic wanted to jump in to try to save the man they were ordered not to do so, the inquest was told. The reason given was that emergency personnel are specially trained to deal with specific types of emergency and if the emergency is outside of your area of expertise then you are not allowed to intervene; too much of a risk, presumably. In this case the officers concerned were only trained up to level one meaning that they could only enter water that went up to their ankles (no, I’m not making this up), and what was required was the expertise of a level two officer who is trained to enter water up to chest height.

Since no level two officer was present the officers who were there were told to stay on dry land. Eventually the level two officers arrived and when they, heroically no doubt, entered the water they discovered that the man was dead. The water, by the way, was three feet deep.

Nobody knows for sure whether or not the delay prevented the victim from being saved because nobody knew for sure when he drowned. However, a doctor told the inquest  that it was possible that he could have been saved if he’d been taken out of the water 10 minutes after falling in. This is not the first such incident involving the strict rules and regulations of Health and Safety.

A couple of years ago a woman fell down an Ayrshire mine shaft and was left there for 8 hours because the winch, present at the shaft, was only to be used to save rescue workers. When the emergency services eventually reached her she was dead. A year or so prior to that a young boy drowned in a Wigan pond because the police officers arriving on the scene were not authorised to enter the water.

It is almost beyond belief that this should be happening anywhere let alone in this once great country of ours. No comment is necessary since the facts speak for themselves but I will say that modern Britain’s obsession with risk management, quality control, health and safety and all the other examples of politically correct nonsense are slowly choking the life out of us; quite literally in some cases.