Health & Safety hits the fishing industry

“In the past few months my boat and I have had several visits from various officials concerned with safety. A total of six people (all with clipboards, naturally) from three separate organisations.”

I was talking to a fishing-boat skipper in West Wales and, as a potential consumer of the fish he was catching, I might have been inclined to applaud the fact our laws are being policed so assiduously. That was before Andrew told me that, strictly speaking, it is an exaggeration on my part to call him the skipper, as he is generally the only person onboard. Not because he’s an unsociable fellow – far from it – but because it’s a 14-foot boat. There’s really only room for Andrew plus the fish he aims to catch. “Mind you, if I get all the new equipment they say I have to get, there won’t be room for both me and the fish.”

Is this another example of our over-zealous attitude to the new orthodoxy of Health & Safety? And could it be that, as usual, we are policing these EU laws far more enthusiastically than other EU members? “Discuss”, as they say on exam papers. All I know is that, in one of my previous lives (20 years in the chemical industry, man and boy) it was a well-known fact that our competitors in certain other EU countries were always happy to see strict EU Directives enacted on environmental pollution and “Elf & Safety”: because they knew that we, who invented cricket, would police those laws more strictly than our neighbours, thus putting our domestic producers at a commercial disadvantage.

In Andrew’s case I don’t imagine he is too concerned with competition from the big Spanish trawlers, but I wonder if the various functionaries that are taking up his time and causing him such frustration, no matter how humorously he may express it, are as keen in chasing the big battalions who can afford to retain legal advice.

I won’t go on – there are already books on the market composed solely of examples of the idiocy that can result from to-the-letter enforcement of H&S laws – but two facts really tickled me. Firstly, Andrew is required to wear not only a hard hat when fishing (and a high-viz jacket maybe?) but a hairnet. (“Because you are handling wet fish”) He has also been given a unique number for his boat (16 digits no doubt) which has to be painted on the underside of the hull. Why? “So that, if you should capsize, the search & rescue team can check your boat number against the database”. I should have thought that the mere fact that the underside of the hull was visible should be a clue to the fact that someone needed rescuing; checking the identity of that boat and skipper could come later. I hope and trust that anyone involved in search and rescue (an essential service in the waters off the Pembrokeshire coast) would agree with me.

Mind you, it’s not all bad. As I said to Andrew: “As a consumer and a frequent fish-eater, I am glad to see that these regulations are being policed. If I should buy the fish you’ve landed, after it’s gone through two or three other pairs of hands including my local supermarket, if then through my own stupidity I put it in the fridge, forget to cook it for a fortnight, and consequently give myself food poisoning, I will be glad to know there’s a tracking system in place that’ll tell me who to sue.”