Underground mapping News & views

The NCE reports this week that companies and organisations that cause death through gross breaches of care should face punitive and significant fines of at least £500,000, following consultation proposals offered by the Sentencing Guidelines Council.

It believes fines for organisations found guilty of the new offence of corporate manslaughter may be measured in millions of pounds and should seldom be below £500,000.

It added that the new sanction of Publicity Orders forcing companies and organisations to make a statement about their conviction and fine introduced under the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act should be imposed in virtually all cases. Organisations may be made to put a statement on their websites.

The guideline also deals with health and safety offences in the workplace that cause death. Fines in these cases should seldom be less than £100,000 and may be measured in hundreds of thousands of pounds or more, the Council proposes.

Factors increasing the seriousness of the offence identified by the Council include how foreseeable was serious injury, how common is the kind of breach of care in the organisation and how far up the organisation did the responsibility for the breach go. Other factors that aggravate the offence and may attract a larger fine include the number of deaths and serious injury caused, failure to heed warnings, cost-cutting or deliberate failure to obtain or comply with relevant licences. 

Once again the need to make those vital double checks before construction work begins is being backed up with real penalties if the failure to do so results in a fatality.  With the cost to check for underground services and hidden features reducing and the level of detail recorded increasing, the need to map almost all sites to aide Health and Safety is becoming a must.

As suggested in the HSG 47 publication Avoiding danger from underground services, anticipation and planning is key to maximising safety when undertaking any ground breaking works.

Council member and vice president of the Court of Appeal (Criminal Division) Lord Justice Anthony Hughes commented to the NCE: “The fine is designed to punish and these are serious offences so the fines imposed should be punitive and significant to reflect that.

Alison Gray, a specialist in health and safety law at solicitors Dickinson Dees, said to the NCE that the changes would significantly increase the fines faced by companies.

“Whilst the proposals fixing fines to a percentage of turnover have been dropped, which will be welcomed by larger companies, the draft guidance is clear that fines imposed by the Court must be punitive and must have an impact on the defendant. They will particularly have a dramatic effect on smaller businesses.

“Minimum fines of £500,000 for corporate manslaughter offences and £100,000 for health and safety offences are proposed but it is unlikely that fines will be kept near the minimum. 

“This is particularly significant for smaller companies as the changes could force them to pay significantly higher fines than at present.  With larger fines being spread over a long period of time, SMEs will potentially feel the burden of a sentence for a very long period of time.

 “In addition to financial penalties, the guidance suggests that Publicity Orders should ordinarily be imposed in all corporate manslaughter cases which will name and shame businesses. In reality this could have just as much, if not more, impact on a business than a financial penalty.”

For the full NCE article go to http://www.nce.co.uk/5210552.article