There is no eDiscovery in this post, although it picks up on my article of 21 October called Assessing risk rather than trying to eliminate it. That drew parallels between attitudes to public safety in the UK and to eDiscovery in the US; the UK suffers, I said, from a “a growing army of jobsworths with clipboards instead of brains” imposing restrictions in purported compliance with the 1974 Health and Safety at Work Act. I quoted from a government report which spoke disparagingly of “the enthusiasm with which often unqualified health and safety consultants have tried to eliminate all risk”, and from a comment of the Health and Safety Executive who complained that “health and safety is being used by too many people as a convenient excuse to hide behind”.

I referred specifically to cases involving the emergency services which, I said, “make particularly good examples because, in each case, a real benefit is lost in pursuit of some petty formal requirement imposed by some whining little runt with too much power relative to his or her brain”. People’s ability to make judgements for themselves was eroded, I said, by officials who were “too stupid to make proper risk assessments” and who had “a strong personal interest in the extension of a culture in which more jobs are created for people like them”.

I find some justification of what I said about the emergency services after an inquest last week found that the Strathclyde rescue services left a woman to die rather than break their health and safety rules.

I have to refer you to the Guardian article about this because of the Times’ paywall, although reading both of them has been illuminating for reasons quite distinct from the story itself, something to which I will return. The Sheriff’s Determination is here.

In summary, a woman fell down a mine shaft in the dark. She was seriously injured, with a collapsed lung, broken ribs and a broken sternum. Her death, however, was caused by exposure as a result of a six hour wait. At the centre of the delay is some equipment which could have been used to save her. The force’s regulations, however, barred them from using this equipment on the public, only for themselves.

You can read for yourself about the arguments raised both when the regulations were drafted and at the time of the incident. The rank-and-file rescuers are ready to go down, and one of them is ordered out of the harness by a senior officer, Commander Paul Stewart. He countermands earlier instructions, The Times says, because “he believes Fire Brigade memorandum states equipment is unsuitable for rescue”. He “believes” eh? He is not sure – perhaps he left his copy at home or could not find his glasses; perhaps reading was not his strong point. Whatever the reason, some thick, gutless officer stood around at the top of a mine shaft whilst a woman died of hypothermia below, despite having access to equipment which could save her and men willing and able to use it.

The word used by the Sheriff which The Times quotes but the Guardian somehow overlooks is “fundamentalist”. The relevant paragraph referring to Commander Stewart and his superior, Group Commander Thomson reads as follows:

I found the evidence of Group Commander Paul Stewart, and Group Commander William Thomson, to be focussed on self justification for the action or non-action taken by them and was without any reflection as to the purposes of this Inquiry and the lessons that may be learned from the rescue attempt.  I found their evidence to be bullish, if not arrogant, in their determination to justify the subservience of the need to carry out a rescue to the need to fulfil to the letter Strathclyde Fire and Rescue Service “Brigade” policy.

….the views expressed by Mr Stewart and Mr Thomson were of a fundamentalist adherence to Strathclyde Fire and Rescue Service policy. They rigidly stood by their operational guidelines.   Their justifications for their actions were presented to the Inquiry as their defence to any accusation of culpability in the death of Mrs Hume.

For a rescue to be achieved, some imagination, flexibility, and adaptability were necessary.  There was clearly a balance to be struck between the interests and safety of the rescuers, and those of the casualty they were there to rescue….in my view, there was a preoccupation with adherence to Strathclyde Fire and Rescue Service policy which was entirely detached from the event with which Strathclyde Fire and Rescue Service were confronted…It is difficult not to form the view that Mr Stewart’s, and Mr Thomson’s, approach to risk assessment was to effectively eliminate risk.

The words “eliminate risk” were part of the heading of my 21 October article, appearing as the opposite of any attempt to assess risk.

The Determination goes to to explain that even the Health & Safety Executive acknowledges that there are occasions when acts of heroism in an emergency will over-ride health and safety considerations. The context here is an employee’s general health and safety duties, not express prohibitions. The latter purport to restrict the discretion, taking the decision-making away from the men on the ground – which is why the person or committee who drafted the rules is as much to blame for the death in this case as the officers who blindly followed them.

One can perhaps see why the Guardianistas would be nervous of the word “fundamentalist”. Although my dictionary defines it simply in relation to Protestant Christianity, “fundamentalist” has come to be associated narrowly with strict Muslim orthodoxy, and the Guardian would be scared, even at second hand, to associate the negative connotations intended by the Sheriff with anything which might upset any minority. Do I digress? Not really. The common element is unthinking cowardice.

Fundamentalists of course, whether Christian or Muslim, are willing to lay down their lives for what they believe to be right. Stewart and Thomson were laying down somebody else’s life. Unfair? The Sheriff’s conclusion was that the woman could have been saved.

There were two risk assessments being made here. The rescue services Director of Operations is quoted as saying “medical advice is that using such equipment would have put her life at extreme risk due to the serious nature of her injuries”. A seriously injured woman freezing to death down a 40 foot hole is at “extreme risk” anyway. The medical advice, if it existed at all, was generic and not made in relation to these particular circumstances, where one set of risks had to be weighed against another. It seems clear that the risk more at the forefront of the officers’ minds lay in the possibility that they might be blamed if the woman died, from whatever cause, whilst they were attempting a rescue. Blind adherence to the rules, without benefit of any thought, intelligence or humanity, helped them to decide to leave her to her fate.

Is hard to see a logical purpose behind a rule which says that certain equipment is good enough for your own people but is unsafe for anyone else. Desk-bound pen-pushers come up with things like this all the time, more, one feels, to justify their own existence than for any practical purpose – what use is a health and safety officer who does not keep churning out rules and policies? The real evil here (and the word “evil” does not overstate it) is that such rules deny discretion to the people on the ground. Their own capacity to think, to assess risk and to make appropriate decisions is sapped, not just in any particular case, but generally. That, I suspect, suits people like Stewart and Thomson well – you would not want either of them on your team in a pub quiz or an initiative test. Anyone who can stand around chattering whilst a woman dies from neglect beneath his feet is not fit for a job with the emergency services.

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