Tuesday 27 February 2007

Let Kids Play

The petition is entitled present an Act to protect organisations from litigation claims arisng from "letting children play" and the explanatory notes say
"More and more organisations and authorities are imposing draconian and nanny state measures to prevent children from being children and playing, eg the banning of "tag" chase in school playgrounds. This can only be due to fear of litigation from some parents who blame others for the natural occurrence of accidents. Of course any Act does not excuse wilful negligence to make environments and supervision safe as is practicable."

This sounds quite reasonable and sensible and so on, until you realise the consequences of it. Organisations will still be held responsible for negligence. OK. So you have to determine when negligence has occurred and when it is merely an accident. Which you do how? Parents have to be able to sue in cases of negligence, and someone has to determine whether the parent is suing justificably or not, and how, short of a court case, can you determine that?

In other words: you can't ban parents from suing without potentially letting negligent organisations off. So how do you prevent organisations, non-negligent ones, from deciding the safest path is to prevent people from suing by preventing accidents at all? I don't see how this can work.

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