Health and safety experts spent two years and £250,000 establishing that ten-pin bowling can be 'very dangerous'

The Health and Safety Executive report, which was prompted by an accident involving an operator, concluded that children were particularly at risk if they ran down lanes and got trapped in machinery - despite there being no evidence the disaster scenario has ever actually occurred.

The HSE initially wanted to see barriers put across the lanes to keep players safe - until it was pointed out that bowlers would not be able to see what they were aiming at. "Because customers need to see the pins and bowling balls entering the machine, managing the risk of access into the machine from the lanes is more difficult," the report found.

Instead, it has told operators to install photoelectric beams to lanes so the machines that realign the pins will cut off automatically if anyone walks up the lane.



John Ashbridge, of The Ten-Pin Bowling Proprietors Association, said he watched the HSE inspectors examining a bowling centre and declared their attempts to detect potential hazards "hilarious".

He said that some operators had already fitted photoelectric beams but while they did not cause any problems, they had largely proved redundant since no players had attempted walking down the lanes.

"I have been in this industry for 40 years and I have never known any member of the public injured by a bowling pinsetter. I have never heard of anybody going near the pins," he said.