What was that about facts and a good story?

The Health and Safety Executive have hit back - well, in truth, they hit back some time ago but I've just caught up with it.

It's a website that every journalist should bookmark - not because it's infallible; I'm sure it's not. But it's a useful other voice on those stories that have become one of lazy journalism's bad habits.

'Health and safety gone mad'.

We all come across these stories and they're seductive - but on the HSE's Myth of the Month pages you can now track those stories like 'schoolkids must wear goggles to play conkers' ... 'ties banned in schools' and this month's myth, 'health and safety rules ban throwing out sweets at pantos'.

In most cases, the story is actually about a single decision of an overzealous head teacher or local official or similar - which doesn't mean it's not a decent story, of course, but usually falls well short of a pattern and rarely tells us anything at all about the country we all live in.

There's another side to this, too. As Myth of the Month makes plain, those overzealous head teachers and officials aren't acting in a vacuum - they've usually seen the 'why oh why did bungling bureaucrats let this tragedy happen' headlines and the calls for resignations and heads to roll.

Usually in the same papers that elsewhere tell us the health and safety industry has gone mad.

Learning point? Make up your mind - you can't have it both ways. If you, as a journalist and representative of the public in holding authority to account, demand that nothing authority does can be allowed to go wrong, don't be surprised when authority's representatives get a bit finicky about the details of ensuring it doesn't.

Oh ... and before you take the easy option of running a story that blames 'health and safety rules' - best make sure it's something to do with them.