A laughable episode at St Pancras highlights all that is bad about our risk averse culture, says Bob Towse, head of technical and safety at the HVCA
HEALTH and safety is not about eliminating risk - it is about managing it. There are very few things in life that are totally risk free and in many ways it is an element of risk that makes a lot of our activities enjoyable.

That might sound strange coming from someone who spends much of their working life analysing and championing safety, but if you are to have a sensible strategy for managing risk you have to accept that you cannot impose a state of 100% safety in every circumstance. Life would be very dull indeed if you did.

However, it seems that the management at St Pancras does not entirely agree.

When Michael Leventhal decided he wanted to give his girlfriend a romantic surprise on her birthday, little could he have imagined that he was about to get caught up in a health and safety storm.

The problem was that he wanted to put a four-inch child's candle into a tiny cake while sitting at the world's longest champagne bar in the lavishly refurbished station.

It sounds to me that he did pretty much everything right. He emailed the station to make sure it would be OK and to ask for their help with the surprise he was planning. He was, not surprisingly, rather taken aback when he received a response explaining that a full risk assessment would be required before the candle lighting could be allowed.

In the end, permission was denied because the relevant safety officer was on holiday so unable to make a decision about whether 'a naked flame' could be permitted. The station management pointed out that a fire extinguisher would have to be on hand in case the child's candle 'burned out of control' putting the station in danger.

It is hard to imagine a more silly episode, particularly as St Pancras has survived for 140 years having been built at the height of the steam age when blazing open furnaces were very much the order of the day. I wonder what the railway pioneers would have made of it all.

Building services contracting has many inherent dangers - I daresay that is part of the appeal to many people who enjoy physical work. No-one with any sense would suggest those dangers can be totally eliminated without changing the nature of the job and, also, many of its outcomes.

Managing risk does not mean throwing a safety blanket over every building site in the country and running for cover. The Nanny State approach holds our safety culture up to ridicule and, in doing so, encourages people to ignore it thus putting more lives in danger.