Young workers

While it is no longer acceptable to assume that all men are stronger than all women, or that people of one colour have different personalities to those of another colour it is, it appears, entirely acceptable to declare that anyone born since 1980 is addicted to social media and will ‘challenge traditional hierarchical HSE systems’, while anyone born before that date is a luddite with no understanding of the modern age, but will be quite happy to toe the line.

The UK's biggest freight operator has been prosecuted for a second time after a child suffered 40% burns when he was shocked by an overhead cable.

The Health and Safety Executive Northern Ireland (HSENI) has committed to ongoing inspections of farms to reduce the number of accidents. Farming was a “high-risk way of life from a health and safety point of view,” HSENI chief executive Robert Kidd told Farming Life magazine.

Conference report

DB Cargo (UK) has been fined £2.7m after a boy of 13 sustained life-changing injuries while playing on the company’s railway marshalling land in Gateshead, Tyne and Wear.

A tool to assess the true cost of workplace wellbeing interventions is filling in the data gap that has so far undermined the business case for them.

The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) investigation found the apprentice was forming a piece of sheet metal into a radius using a three-roll bending machine when his gloved hand was drawn in by the in-running nip between two steel rollers. The HSE found that the accident, which happened at Air Management & Design's premises on Spencroft Road in Newcastle-under-Lyme on 3 March 2018 was more likely because he was using fully fingered gloves.

Ryan Griffin, 27, pleaded guilty to breaching two offences under the Health and Safety at Work Act. On 16 January at York Magistrates' Court he was given a community order for 12 months with a 25-day rehabilitation activity requirement and ordered to pay £1,500 prosecution costs. Environmental health officers from the City of York Council described the pool at Dolphins Swim School as dirty, "with a brown and green colour ["¦] and emitting a pungent smell", when they visited the premises in September 2015.

Twenty-six-year-old Kevin Hoare was attempting to clear a blockage when the incident happened at a housing development on Cranbrook Road, Wimbledon on 13 February 2017. Hoare, who had only joined Anytime McDaids two months earlier, was not being supervised and had not been provided with adequate training.

The “bonkers conkers” story – arguably the most pervasive and, for the status of OSH practitioners, damaging safety myth in the UK – originated in a school playground. The legend that a head teacher insisted children wear safety goggles when playing the autumnal game had little grounding in reality. But it drew attention to a more important question about how we manage students’ earliest experiences of safety and health management.