You can have your cake in Dundee - a recipe for PR disaster

I stumbled across this gem this week: Dundee City Council has banned home baking at school fairs on the grounds of - you guessed it - health and safety. But the jobs-worths in whatever over-staffed department deals with health and safety have backed down after angry parents stated the blindingly obvious: home baking is a great way to raise money and poses very little risk. In fact, can anyone recall the last time anyone was killed or injured eating a scone at the school fair?

From a public relations point of view, what does this silly story tell us? Far too many organisations have no grasp whatsoever of commonsense. The crackpot decision from Dundee follows on the heels of other equally absurd nanny state diktats like banning kids from running in the playground in case they hurt themselves.

Health and safety is now a bloated industry whose tentacles reach into every aspect of life. The bossy types who are attracted to this kind of work feel the only way they can justify their very well-paid jobs is by dreaming up more and more annoying ways to tell us how to run our lives.

There is a very simple PR lesson in this that can be applied to all organisations. Every major decision that has an impact on the public has to be thought out in advance to assess the impact it will have on the reputation of that body. I’m not for a moment suggesting some kind of cynical PR spin is put on everything that is communicated to the public – that’s a sure-fire recipe for losing trust with the public because you are not being honest and transparent.

But it shouldn’t take a genius to work out that banning mums and dads from baking cakes for the local primary school is going to do anything other than drive them mad with frustration. The council’s mealy-mouthed statement said the climbdown was due to ‘further consideration of available risk mitigation measures’. Translated from cooncil-speak, I think that means they’ve realised what a fool they’ve made of themselves.

Watch this space for further PR disasters from council bureaucrats.