Cap'n Chris said:
Red tape never gets cut, despite what they promise. It's just a fact of life and will forever remain. JOBS DEPEND ON IT - the very jobs of the people who have the power to cut the red tape, but they AIN'T going to put themselves out of work are they?
It is not to do with maintaining jobs - though I do not deny that some few folk have made careers along the way - it is about arse-covering. To present badger's argument in a slightly different way, if you are the person who is deemed responsible by society for something, anything - but especially children, then you need not just to ensure that your charges are safe, you need to do so in such a way that when you are taken to court for negligence that you can demonstrate that in fact you did everything possible to ensure their safety and security.
This means that taking a value judgement that these four blokes who have caved together for ten years will be OK with the kids
is not good enough especially when formal exercises such as crb checks and (dare I say it) CIC certification are available. The former approach can be challenged and may well lose. The latter is simply following recognised good practice and so it won't.
Now, I happen to know that the lovely and svelte Mr Binding who started this discussion is an extremely competent caver. He is also a CIC. Is it the latter that makes him such a good caver? No, it's years of practice, experience and a deep interest in the skills and equipment. Does that CIC, however make him the person to choose to herd your kids, yes, 'cos
you will be seen to have done the right thing. It does not, however, make him a better caver, even a better SRT caver than a number of other individuals whom both of us know and have caved with.
Some will blame 'the lawyers' for all this. While one can be sure that legal practice has adapted to the situation, that is only really because it has had to. The underlying reason is the simple fact that whenever something goes wrong people do, sadly, always look at who is to blame. You get this in everything from child care issues to the situation with flooding in Cheddar Gorge last winter. In the latter, people were blaming everyone from Somerset Wildlife Trust to Gough's Cave management; the fact that it had, simply, been piss wet for months wasn't good enough. In legal cases I have heard lawyers despair of clients who maintain that they are only pursuing a case to ensure that 'things' are improved for the future so that nobody has to go through what they went through, but whose tone changes when they learn that they'll not get what they see as their rightful compensation if nobody is to be blamed. It's greed in their case, plain and simple.
Now, one of the statistics that everybody on here is vaguely aware of is that the BCA's PI insurance policy in its present guise has never had to make a payout. One of the reasons for this, I am sure, is the lack of under sixteens that it covers and the lack of 'professional' guides and instructors covered. For these reasons the 'blame game' is rarely played out in British caving. People may complain about the size of the premium that we pay, but believe me it is as nothing to what it would be if just one case like the poor lad at Manchester Hole, or an army instructed drowning at Porth yr Ogof was to have been covered by it. That's a route that we really don't want to go down.