Workers at the Health and Safety Executive have been banned from moving furniture around their offices.

Staff have been told to book a porter to complete the task - and allow two days for it to happen, reports the Daily Mail.

To hammer home the point, signs reading: 'Do not lift tables or chairs without giving 48 hours notice to HSE management', have been plastered across the walls.

Labour peer Lord Berkeley noticed the signs when he attended a meeting at the London headquarters of the HSE.

Incensed by what he considered to be "health and safety gone mad", Lord Berkeley raised the matter in the House of Lords, demanding in a parliamentary question to know why the HSE had put up the notices.

"I saw them and thought, 'It just can't be true'," he said. "It's ridiculous to mollycoddle people like that. It's taking health-and-safety precautions to a ridiculous level.

"The HSE is an office like any other - so if it is not required in other offices, why there? It's the epitome of a nanny state."

The signs have been put up in almost all of the 31 HSE offices across the country, where 3,600 staff are employed.

A spokesman said: "HSE's approach to moving furniture in its offices is based on its own assessment of the risks from manual handling - one of the main causes of work-related absence among its staff."

But an insider at the executive reportedly described life there as "a nanny state gone absolutely bonkers".

"Are we seriously supposed to wait two days before we can rearrange a room so we can all see each other in a meeting?"

Source: Ananova