“If you have ten thousand regulations you lose all respect for law.” Winston Churchill

Regulation; in the dictionary it is referred to as “to control something, especially by making it work in a particular way”. I have a different definition; “patronizing and at times daft”. You may have your own definition but regulation is something I wanted to highlight as a few incidents came to my attention recently and I would be lying if the word ‘stupid’ didn’t come to mind.

Healthy and Safety (HSE) rules are ‘supposedly’ put in place for our own good and they have taken a bit of a bashing in recent years, but it seems that they can’t be blamed for all the daft rules. If you missed the recent case involving Harrods; they have a rule of “No walking across the shop floor with a hot drink”, which turned into a sex discrimination case involving a security guard who was sacked due to this incident. HSE have claimed that the issue of open topped hot drinks is not a safety issue but it does ask the question “How many daft rules are made up by the companies in question themselves?”

There was the incident where a bar would not allow a customer to carry a tray of drinks because they had not been HSE trained. An airline passenger was told boiled sweets were no longer provided on the grounds of HSE – for children I might add. The passenger in question was an adult so you can only imagine what was going through her mind.

So the moral of this story is we all need to stand to attention like Meerkats, get a degree in HSE and forget ever having a hot drink in the office again as it could prove to be fatal. It seems that the world has gone mad!

If you like the way we think – you will like the way we work.

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