Welcome to the season of Christmas Bah Humbug. As you read this, somewhere in Scotland someone with a clipboard will be imposing a banning order on office Christmas decorations, lest some hapless employee totters over the tinsel or muffs the mistletoe hanging. Come the first cold snap, killjoy janitors will be out in force salting away playground ice slides - sorry, "enduring slip hazards". That will be followed by those deathly April showers that will immediately render out of bounds the playing field of any school lucky enough still to have one because, as one headteacher put it, "wet grass can be very dangerous to children". The summer sun may shine on the school sports but don't expect them to be "bags of fun", as the old headline writers used to put it, because many schools have now banned sack races in case children fall and injure themselves. Egg- and-spoon races are off the programme, too, as children could accidentally gouge out their eyes when the cutlery starts to fly. Not that it's ever happened. And, of course, once the little dears go back in the autumn, there are all those lethal conkers to legislate against.

Journalist and broadcaster Alan Pearce was so sickened by such edicts of mind-boggling stupidity that he has collected them into a book: Playing it Safe, the Crazy World of Britain's Health and Safety Regulations. His examples include fencing off village ponds and a 24-page instruction manual supplied with a pair of Wellington boots. "There is virtually no area of our lives left untouched by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), an organisation that has banned more commonplace activities than the Taliban," he laments.

Unfortunately, Mr Pearce has chosen the wrong target. This area has been the subject of much misreporting because the Taliban in this instance is more likely to be a self-justifying health and safety official from the local council than a hard-pressed employee of the Health and Safety Executive. Ten years ago, when legal aid for negligence claims was withdrawn, the hope was that there would be fewer daft claims. Ironically, their numbers have mushroomed, thanks to law practices marketing "no-win, no-fee" offers. This has led to huge hikes in the cost of professional indemnity cover and one-off events' insurance, bringing Britain closer to the American-style compensation culture.

In fact, the HSE is so enraged by the damage to its image from these hare-brained edicts, that it is fighting back with a Myth of the Month slot on its website. Recent choices include the banning of egg boxes from school craftwork for fear of spreading salmonella, trapeze artists being obliged to wear hard hats and the oldest chestnut of all - banning playground conker contests. None of them has any legal basis, so any such cases result from over-zealous bureaucrats who interpret their brief as being to eliminate all risk from every public activity.

There's no doubt in my mind that this health and safety extremism is transforming our lives, and more especially the lives of our children, and not for the better. Nursery rhymes are full of accidents: Jack falls down and breaks his crown, Humpty Dumpty falls off the wall. My childhood was punctuated with minor mishaps: a fall from a climbing frame that cost two teeth, a knee still scarred by plummeting from a hollow tree. It never occurred to my parents to stop me doing these things because they rightly calculated that small injuries help children avoid bigger ones in the future. Part of growing up is learning to make the necessary risk-assessment every time we cross a road.

As Harry Potter puts it epigrammatically in Order of the Phoenix after Dolores Umbridge, the ultimate jobsworth, bans Hogwarts pupils from practising magic: "How can we prepare ourselves for danger if we're never faced with danger?" Recently, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents felt obliged to intervene in the debate to insist that children are being too cosseted and that real risk-taking in play is necessary to live fully and successfully. "A skinned knee or a twisted ankle in a challenging and exciting play environment is not just acceptable, it is a positive necessity," said Rospa chief executive Tom Mullarkey, adding: "We need to prepare our children for a complex, dangerous world in which healthy, robust activity is more a national need than ever before." The suspicion is that health and safety rules are being used as a cover for cost-cuts when play equipment is removed or leisure facilities closed, adding to the obesity crisis.

Those fighting the wetness tendency in modern life recently gained a valuable recruit in Conn Iggulden. Look in any bookshop this Christmas and you'll find piles of his Dangerous Book for Boys and various sequels. These traditional-looking manuals for making everything from go-karts to bows and arrows are a throw-back to the free-range childhood of yesteryear and they are the runaway success story of children's publishing this year.

We should be doing more to challenge the orthodoxy of our safety obsessed culture. The molly-coddling has now been extended to adults. Passengers arriving at Queen Street Low Level, subjected to endless repeats of a recorded message telling them to hold the handrail and not to run, are entitled to ask if First ScotRail has gone loco. Last month Mike Oldfield of Tubular Bells announced he was leaving Britain for good after his window cleaners presented him with a 10-page contract.

There are several serious points behind all this. The first is that, along with heavy-handed child-protection legislation, the clipboard mentality is deterring many people from doing voluntary work. Recent examples in my own family include my husband being faced with a 24-page health and safety form when he volunteered to help coach table tennis at our local primary school. At the time he had just decided against taking a group of cubs camping after being confronted by an even longer form and the prospect of a meeting with the "Night Away Coordinator".

It also risks compromising the work of our emergency services. Admittedly, there has always been a thin line between recklessness and bravery but the H&S culture is making it easier to do nothing, even when lives are at stake. Recently, two police community support officers decided against trying to save a 10-year-old boy from drowning in a lake because they had not been trained in underwater rescues.

Most seriously of all, they distract attention from serious shortcomings of health and safety in the workplace that claim scores of lives each year. The chatter about over-the-top box-tickers obscures the real issue of hundreds of callous employers who cut corners on safety and a Health and Safety inspectorate that is too puny and underfunded to tackle them. Dorothy Wright from Largs is still waiting for a date for the inquest into the death of her only son, Mark, in an explosion in a factory in Wales in April 2005. His employer hadn't had a visit from the HSE in 17 years. In the past year 241 people have died and 140,000 have been injured in workplace accidents in Britain. The new Corporate Homicide Act represents a missed opportunity for holding negligent employers to account. Scotland could and should grasp the nettle with more robust legislation. Health and safety should be about preventing another death like Mark's, not wrapping children in cotton wool.