VDU Workstation/Display Screen Equipment Checklist for Safety Reps…
Consulting Employees on Health & Safety…
An overview of employers’ duties to consult with their employees on health and safety matters.
Hand-Arm Vibration…
Updated advice for employees.
Provision of Welfare Facilities at Fixed Construction Sites
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As reported in the Risks Newsletter 378…
The Health and Safety (Offences) Bill became law on 16 October, when it received Royal assent. The Bill, put forward by Labour MP Keith Hill cleared it last hurdle earlier that month, when it passed a third reading in the House of Lords. Under the new legislation, the Health and Safety (Offences) Act 2008, the maximum fine in magistrates’ courts will be raised to £20,000 for most offences and imprisonment will be made an option for a wider range of breaches. The Act, which applies throughout the UK, makes most offences triable either way’, which in effect means unlimited fines. TUC head of safety Hugh Robertson said the realising the benefits of the new law would require the courts to treat safety offences as serious crimes.
The TUC welcomes the fact that this bill has finally made it on to the statute book,’ he said. ‘The need to increase fines was first recognised by the government over eight years ago and trade unions have been campaigning hard for stronger penalties to be available for those who are convicted of criminally putting the health or safety of their workforce at risk.’ He added, however, ‘these increased penalties will only make a difference if courts actually impose fines that act as a meaningful deterrent rather than just a slap on the wrist as is so often the case today.’ Health and safety minister Lord McKenzie said: ‘These changes will insure that sentences can now be more easily set at a level to deter businesses that do not take their health and safety management responsibilities seriously and further encourage employers and others to comply with the law.’ The minister added: ‘Furthermore, by extending the £20,000 maximum fine to the lower courts and making imprisonment an option, more cases will be resolved in the lower courts and justice will be faster, less costly and more efficient. Jail sentences for particularly blameworthy health and safety offences committed by individuals, can now be imposed reflecting the severity of such crimes, whereas there were more limited options in the past.’
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A dead rabbit gets swifter, better justice
13 June, 2009 — handsignsI couldn’t let this one slip by without re-printing it here. (Thanks to Rory O’Neill, editor of Hazards magazine, for permission to use such articles from Risks, the TUC’s weekly online bulletin for safety reps and others.)
Safety campaigners have reacted furiously after the death of a rabbit was treated more seriously by the courts than the death of a construction worker. Families Against Corporate Killers (FACK), which speaks for the bereaved relatives of workplace fatality victims, was speaking out after Discovery Homes (Scotland) Ltd was fined £5,000 and the firm’s director Richard Pratt £4,000 on 8 June after the death of employee Andrezej Freitag. On the same day Steven Appleton was jailed for causing unnecessary suffering to a rabbit at Magistrates Court in Caerphilly after he stamped it to death. He received a six month custodial sentence. FACK member Sharon Norman, whose father Gordon Field was crushed to death at work, has written to prime minister Gordon Brown to protest. She said: ‘When I read the two news reports and the outrageously different penalties handed down by our courts to the killer of a rabbit and the killers of a man, I was so angry and I had to email the prime minister. I asked him to explain to me how this could be right.’ She added: ‘Every year many more people are given custodial and suspended sentences for animal cruelty than have ever been given such sentences for killing a worker. We don’t condone animal cruelty but cruelty to people that devastates families must surely be more serious?’ She added it took three years after her dad was killed at work for his negligent employer to be fined, ‘yet the rabbit killer was tried, convicted and sentenced in a few months.’
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