by Ross Clark - Wednesday, 5th September 2007 -

Just how much do you want that egg stain removed from your tie?

I only ask because if you read a leaflet put out by the Health And Safety Executive (HSE) entitled Dry Cleaners: Are You In Control? you would probably conclude you can live with those dirt marks after all.
 
"Most people don’t consider dry cleaning to be a dangerous industry," begins this marvellous document.

"But just consider the following:

A dry cleaner is electrocuted because of faulty electrics.

An employee is found unconscious having tried to mop up a spill of cleaning solvent.

Customers are hurt when a perchloroethylene machine explodes during distillation.

An outbreak of legionnaires’ disease is traced to a drycleaner’s wet cooling tower .

Major structural damage is caused when a steam boiler blows up.

"All nightmare scenarios for the dry cleaning industry and costly in many different ways. But none of them need happen if the drycleaner is in control of health and safety".
 
These scenarios need not happen? You can say that again. Fascinated by just how many dry cleaners’ shops are in the habit of exploding, emitting clouds of poisonous gas and striking us down with legionnaires’ disease, I contacted the HSE and asked them for a log of fatal dry cleaning disasters.

"Er, not sure we can do that sir," came the response. "I don’t think we break down our statistics to the dry cleaning business."

Having trawled through the HSE’s statistics myself I couldn’t find a single fatality attributed to the dry cleaning industry (there were only six deaths in the entire retail sector last year).

Nor could I find a reference to a single boiler explosion across the whole of British business.

Never mind the failure of dry cleaners to explode or to kill us in other ways.

The government and the European Union have nevertheless decided between themselves that it is time for a crackdown.

By October 31 all dry cleaners must obtain a "permit to operate" from their local authority or face closure. All is explained in Process Guidance Note 6/46 (04), published by the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA).

Talk about national stereotyping: the rules have been translated into Greek, Turkish, Gujarati and Urdu.

Whether it is such good news for anyone wanting to clean their suit is another matter: we will just have to hope that not too many shops are driven out of business by the nannying regulations.

Henceforth, all dry cleaners will have to keep a log of their operations, including the weight of clothes they clean, the stock of solvents they use and how much solvent they use each time.

In order to do this they must weigh their stock of solvents every week, and thereby calculate exactly how much has been consumed by their dry cleaning machines.

Moreover, they must describe in great detail their training procedures and how they plan to keep their records of solvents used.

Of course solvents are hazardous substances which contribute towards pollution and can lay you flat out if sprayed onto a rag and sniffed.

But if the aim is to catch out rogue dry cleaners, what use is a log compiled by themselves, which might easily be faked?

If the HSE thinks a dry cleaner is polluting the environment surely it should send its officers to snoop around the premises for leaking solvent fumes.

Of course they won’t do this because it would put valuable health and safety officers out into the hazardous environment of a British High Street. Far safer if you can restrict them to poring over data in the office.

DEFRA’s officials certainly don’t have hugely high expectations of the Turks and Indians beavering away in dry cleaning shops.

The guide is stuffed with guidance on "best practice" in the dry cleaning industry, including this gem: "The door to the machine is then closed and not opened again until the cycle is finished."

Just because officials down at DEFRA are a bit shaky over how to wash their own socks, is it any excuse to insult the intelligence of those who have been running dry cleaners’ shops for years?