Tony Blair on "Needless Panic"

Blair Questions 'Needles Panic' over Issues

By Andrew Woodcock, PA Political Correspondent

Britain is in danger from needless panic over issues ranging from food safety to mobile phones, Prime Minister Tony Blair said in an interview published today.

Calling for a "real debate about risk", Mr Blair said he was concerned about an over-cautious approach to life which had left teachers, health workers and nursery assistants in fear of litigation for any accident
His comments came in an interview with The Observer, in which he acknowledged that his personal standing would be "an issue" in the upcoming General Election, but said that the same would be true whoever was Labour leader.

Speaking amid a flurry of personal appearances, TV interviews and speeches in Labour's frenetic pre-election campaign, Mr Blair said he had been struck as he travelled the country by the numbers of people raising concerns about the "compensation culture."

And he said he was concerned about the country wasting disproportionate amounts of money dealing with relatively insignificant problems, simply because a scare has been whipped up around them.

His remarks came hot on the heels of the Sudan-1 dye alert, which saw hundreds of contaminated food products withdrawn at an estimated cost of 100 million of pounds, even though experts insisted that the risk of cancer from the banned additive was tiny.

"It is probably best not to do this in the heat of an election campaign, but at some point we need a real debate about risk," he told the paper.

We are in danger of "depending on whatever is the media campaign of the day" ending up spending literally hundreds, sometimes millions of pounds meeting quite a small risk, when actually that money would be far better used in other ways.

Mr Blair said that the fears of public service workers over the potential for a US-style litigation culture had made a deep impact on him.

"I was quite shocked to be told by people who were running a nursery that they were worried about letting the kids out into the playground when it was wet, in case one of them slipped and fell and they ended up having a legal case," he said.

We have got to look at a way of getting people protection on that.