Listen Paul I've done plenty of things in my career well worth criticising. In this case we went from a practical but very basic 40 odd page document to one of over 600.
Banned a number of perfectly reasonable activities because they involved an aspect that couldn't be regulated, basically the brief was to remove as much risk as possible.
We ended up with a core structure for all activities, approvals etc and then specifics relating to everything from deep sea fishing to table tennis.
but it's a piece of work I'm pretty proud of as it made sure the right people both professional and volunteers were involved in organising and supervising activities for children and young people.
The problem was that a lot of people were overzealous in applying it and started the process by looking for reasons not to do something rather than risk assessing and establishing a procedure to manage the risk.
But you're right there was a need to regulate and discourage well meaning but unplanned outdoor activity.
True story, group of volunteers from Pollok managed to get funds together for a trip for kids to play football in New York. The council had no knowledge of the group until we received a call from the US saying they didn't have enough money to get back. The loonies had known that they could only afford one way tickets and they were being accommodated by the host teams, so spent all their remaining money on entertainment mainly for the adults knowing the Regional Council would bail them out.
My colleague who drew the short straw to fly over an organise the return came back with a catalogue of horror stories including that there had been no contact for days on end with some of the kids. They were all alright and in my view were safer with the american families than the nut jobs that took them.
As always the kids loved it. Unsurprisingly none of the families wanted any fuss and there was no law actually broken.
