Police shootout with armed robbers on Scotland's streets? Why 'health and safety' is a life-saver

Health and safety regulations can be a pain in the neck - until they save lives

This is my latest column, published on 20th January 2026.

Hands up, I’ve sometimes not been a great fan of the ‘health and safety’ movement. The regulations designed to keep us safe have often, in my experience, been used as an excuse for inaction and a block on initiative – the dead hand of ‘thou shalt not’.

There are often times when there’s a thin line between being risk averse and risk aware, but there are undoubtedly times when health-and-safety thinking makes sense, even though I didn’t always see it.

In the 1980s, like most police detectives at that time, I was engaged in hunting armed robbers. There was still a lot of cash about and bank and Post Office robberies were common.

Sawn-off shotguns were the weapon of choice, with shots fired into the ceiling to terrify staff. It was amazing that more innocents were not killed and injured. In response, we mounted armed patrols in the hope of intercepting the robbers and pressured our contacts for any information.

On one occasion, we got a tip that a bank was to be robbed by an armed gang, and formed a plan to catch them in the act with our own armed response. At the last minute, wiser heads prevailed.

Understandably wanting to prevent a shootout in a busy street, we were instructed to park a marked police car outside the bank to deter the robbers, which it duly did. We were terribly frustrated. It was our chance to catch the robbers red-handed, what we had been waiting for.

But, on reflection, we knew our bosses had been right. It’s always better to prevent a crime, and if there’s ever a question of deciding between risk and safety, it must always be safety.

I was thinking about that balance last week when reading the details of the terrible fire that swept through a Swiss bar, killing 40 young people. With teenagers in my close family, it made my blood run cold.

Packing a subterranean bar space with young people, serving alcohol, and parading about with fireworks in the close proximity to foam insulation was not only asking for trouble, it was positively seeking it out.

The bar’s customers deserved better care, especially the very young, enjoying the evening without caution. Unsurprisingly, its managers now face criminal charges, but they should perhaps not stand in the dock alone.

What about the fire and safety checks, the licensing requirements, the capacity quota? It seems to me that someone responsible for health and safety may have failed dreadfully.

You could almost understand it in a poverty-stricken country, but Switzerland, famous for its meticulous approach to systems and regulations? If any society was going to be risk averse, you’d have thought it would be the Swiss.

We will no doubt hear the full details in time but I wouldn’t mind betting that financial cutbacks played a role in the failure to inspect and regulate. And here’s the lesson for us .

In straitened times, it’s tempting for councils to cut ‘administrative’ functions like regulatory inspections.

It’s a fatal mistake. If any good is to come from this utter tragedy, it is a reminder of the consequences of lax regulation. Laws and safety regulations are only as good as their enforcement. Anything less is meaningless box-ticking.