SPEAK to any small business owner about the biggest challenges facing their attempts to turn an honest daily profit, and it won’t be long – Covid and, possibly, Brexit notwithstanding – until the dreaded words “health and safety” enter the conversation.

And the prospect of a jobsworth with a clipboard and a nasally-challenged voice demanding that you must do all the things on this list, and you must fill in that form precisely and correctly, before you’re allowed to do the tiniest little thing, certainly isn’t one to fill the heart with joy.

Despite what some businesspeople might have you believe, though, health and safety rules exist for a very good reason.

And the moment your health or your safety, or that of someone close to you, is put at risk by the action or inaction of others is the moment that you realise health and safety matters very much indeed.

That thought has bounced around my head every time we’ve reported on the Cameron House Hotel fire and its aftermath. And it did so again when I first read what Jane Midgley, whose son Simon died in the devastating blaze, told us earlier this week.

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Jane was reacting to the news that despite previous protests to the contrary, the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service will, after all, hold a fatal accident inquiry (FAI) into the tragedy.

The phrase “lessons must be learned” is trotted out so often that it’s almost become a cliche.

Cameron House’s owners will argue - indeed, they already have - that they really have learned the lessons from that terrible morning in 2017.

But an FAI, and the recommendations which will surely follow from it, is a crucial step towards ensuring that others do indeed learn from the failures which led to Richard Dyson and Simon Midgley’s deaths.

“Cameron House was told, and told, and told again, and did nothing.” Not our words but Jane Midgley’s. And words which should ring around the head of every person with responsibility for the health and safety of others.

Nobody should ever again need to be told, and told, and told again what they have to do to keep themselves and others safe from danger: whatever comes out of the FAI, the words “Cameron House” should be all that’s needed to be sure of that.