Last week, an acquaintance who runs his own business was sent an email from his landlord concerning window cleaning. To comply with health and safety rules the landlord was demanding a “method statement” detailing the technique used to clean the inside of the windows as well as a numerical measure of the risks involved. So my friend stopped running his business in order to report that the job was done using a bucket of water, some detergent, a sponge and a squeegee.

This is how it now goes. Every single possible risk facing every single business – not just concerning health and safety but in everything else too – has to be documented, checked, subjected to numerical stress tests, and then reassessed with mitigating factors considered.

Actually, that isn’t quite true. Not every risk gets measured: there is one that never gets dealt with at all. It’s the biggest risk of the lot – that the chief executive gets so high on power that he or she loses the plot.