Red-Tape Britain Costs Lives

Via Bagehot, an enraging story from the Mail on Sunday:

[O]n an overcast lunchtime last March when no fewer than 25 members of the emergency services, including a press officer, descended on a 3½ft-deep model boating lake minutes after Simon Burgess, 41, fell into the water when he suffered a seizure. But as an inquest heard last week, he lay floating face-down for more than half an hour while firemen, police and paramedics watched and did nothing.

The reason? Even though they could all swim, the first fire crew to arrive hadn’t been ‘trained’ to enter water higher than ankle-deep. Instead they waited for ‘specialists’ to arrive to retrieve his body. They had decided Mr Burgess must surely be dead because he had been in the water for ten minutes. When a policeman decided to go in anyway, he was ordered not to. A paramedic was also told not to enter the water because he didn’t have the right ‘protective’ clothing and might be in breach of the Personal Protective Equipment at Work Regulations 1992.

[…] Mr Burgess had been feeding swans from a plastic bag that blew into the lake. He went in to retrieve it and while he was in the water he had a fit and fell unconscious. Last week, Coroner David Horsley ruled his death was an accident on the balance of probabilities, but said there was a chance, ‘albeit a slim one’, he could have been saved had the emergency services intervened sooner.

Fire station watch manager Tony Nicholls arrived at the scene within five minutes but refused to try to rescue Mr Burgess because, he told the inquest, his crew’s ‘Level 1’ training only allowed them to go in the water up to their ankles.

Hampshire Fire and Rescue said all its firefighters were trained  to Level 1, which includes ‘general water safety awareness and basic land-based rescue techniques’. To comply with the guidelines, they had to wait for a specialist water rescue team to arrive. Mr Nicholls said these officers were ‘Level 2-trained’, meaning they could ‘go in chest- high’. Only those who had completed the Level 3 course would be allowed to swim, however. Although it wasn’t made clear at the inquest, the rule about not entering water more than ankle-high is based entirely on guidelines drawn up by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs for tackling flood emergencies. A Hampshire Fire and Rescue spokesman admitted the service knew the guideline was originally intended as advice to be followed at  flood incidents – but the service insists firefighters apply it in ALL water-related incidents.

Take your pick of what’s the grimmest detail in this story. I think it may be the presence of a “press officer”. I don’t suppose any of these public sector heroes have been sanctioned for their appalling failures in this case. It may be that poor Mr Burgess could not have been saved but one way of ensuring he’d die would be to hum and haw on the edge of a three-foot deep pond until such a time as the matter was beyond any doubt.

It would be nice to suppose this was an isolated incident. But it’s not. The ambulance service is happy to put an uninterrupted tea-break above saving lives. There remain plenty of Spanish practices that need rooting out. I’m not greatly in favour of more regulations but if the fire brigade needs a regulation to remind them that they should be able to master a pond used for sailing model boats then, by god, perhaps this regulation will have to be issued. Next: are they still allowed to climb trees? Or does that require Level 4 “training”?