The soft generation

Entrepreneur slams Health & Safety rules as ruining sense of adventure

The entrepreneur founder of the Yo! Sushi chain has decided to take a stand against the encroachment of daft health and safety rules.

Simon Woodroffe complained that today, young people in the UK are growing up without the ability to have real adventures without being told they’re taking unnecessary risk, and banned from doing so by bureaucracy and rules.

"It is up to all of us to start shouting about this - that enough is enough," he said.

"Children need to go out and have adventures, even though there might be a marginal risk to it. Otherwise they grow up with a nature that means they are scared to put their left foot in front of their right."

Woodroffe is a patron of the Go4It awards, an organisation that rewards any school that shows it is driving its pupils towards a healthy respect for adventure and risk. Last year the organisers were horrified when a school that has won an award deemed the journey to London too risky for its pupils to take – exactly the kind of reaction that Go4It is kicking against.

"Children learn to be capable people by taking these risks,” Woodroffe says. “What we need to do is allow kids to live in the real world where there is danger. There is a great denial, things can go wrong in this world, but we can't have it so that teachers can't change a child's jumper or they can't take kids on an outward bound weekend.”

For more details see www.campaignforadventure.org