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What does “unlimited fine” really mean?
Penalties for breaches of health & safety are governed, in the UK, by the Health & Safety Offences Act 2008. This stipulates that the maximum financial penalty for most h&s offences is a £20,000 fine at the Magistrates' Court (the lower court) and an unlimited fine at the Crown Court.
These penalties sound severe - and so they are - but I wonder how many people think that they are somehow academic, and that the courts will never really go to these limits, even though they're on the statute book?
Well, if you are of that optimistic school of thought here's a true story that may cause you to change your mind.
In 2009 the Crown Court in London tried a case resulting from an accident on a building site in London, an accident in which an employee had been injured. This had only come to light when the employee, who had been left unable to work, had gone to the local Social Security office to claim State sickness benefit. The office was unable to trace the accident (because, as it later transpired, it had never been reported) and the matter was handed over to the Health & Safety Executive (HSE).
HSE inspectors visited the site unannounced and found that h&s was apparently an alien concept as far as the site management was concerned. In other words - it just didn't exist!
Matters were not helped by the attitude of the company's owner and sole director who tried to frustrate the enquiry at every turn. However, it seems he went a little too far when he decided to play at being a lawyer. He realised that under English law a "limited company" such as his has a separate legal identity, and that gave him an idea.
He reasoned that since the HSE were investigating his company he could thwart the enquiry by closing his existing company down, transferring all the assets to a new company, and then carrying on as before. The HSE investigation would grind to a halt because the target of the enquiry would have ceased to exist, and the new company could not be held liable for the alleged mistakes of the old. Simples!
Unfortunately for the would-be "legal eagle" he hadn't read Section 37 of the Health & Safety at Work Act 1974. Which was a shame, because the section says that it is possible to prosecute a director of a company if it can be shown that the offence was due to his "consent, connivance, or neglect" (such lovely phraseology, don't you think?)
So that's what the HSE did - they prosecuted the director and not his company.
He lost his subsequent trial at the Crown Court and had to face the legal consequences. The Judge fined him £99,500 for various breaches of health & safety, and then, in addition, ordered him to pay legal costs amounting to a further £150,000.
Do the sums and you'll see he received a personal financial penalty of just under a quarter of a million pounds!
As if that were not enough to make his eyes water the Judge rounded off his day perfectly by warning him that, should he fail to pay up in full, he would go to jail.
So, when the law says "unlimited fine" it seems that's just what it means.
Of course, I could be wrong ..... but I don't think so. Do you?
Management & Safety Training Ltd
www.managementandsafety.co.uk
Blog:
http://andyfarrall.wordpress.com
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