Legal surgery
Graeme Cushion answers more of your food
legislation questions
The new Corporate Manslaughter & Homicide Act takes effect from 6 April.
The legislation does not really impose any new duties upon those involved in the management of safety issues, but rather brings with it a new set of penalties. The new legislation applies to "corporations", which are defined as anybody corporate whether incorporated in the UK or elsewhere. As well as those companies incorporated under com-panies legislation, anybody incorporated under statute will also be covered.
The legislation also applies to a specific list of government departments and other bodies, which are listed within the legislation. In addition it also applies to police forces as well as partnerships, trade union and employers' associations (as long as they are employers).
The act does not extend currently-existing duties in respect of safety requirements. Organisations already have to make sure
they comply with relevant legislation relating
to fire safety, food safety and workplace
safety. Hopefully, the necessary training
measures will already be in place to ensure that employees, contractors and members of the public are adequately protected.
The Fire Safety (Regulatory Reform) Order 2005 governs fire safety. In essence, the onus is placed upon the occupiers of the premises to make sure that they are taking the necessary fire precautions. The fire authority can no longer be relied upon to visit the premises and issue a fire certificate, which essentially lists all the measures that need to be complied with. Instead, the whole process of fire risk assessment is left in the hands of the occupier, who must identify the risks and take the necessary preventative measures to minimise those risks or exclude them altogether.
Similarly, the Health & Safety at Work Act 1974 is still the governing legislation in terms of workplace safety. The Food Safety Act 1990 governs the requirements in respect of the provision of food.
The new legislation will kick in, in the event that there is a fatality in the workplace. It makes it much easier to secure a conviction against an organisation, in that all that will have to be established is that the way in which the organisation's activities were managed or organised had contributed to the death.
To put this in fairly simply terms, it would seem that an outbreak of food poisoning, for example, which leads to someone's death, could lead to a prosecution under the new legislation if the organisation in question has demonstrated a lack of appropriate attention to food-safety requirements.
The processes of training and identification of risks will be crucial for companies if they are to avoid liability under the new legislation.
The same would also be true in respect
of failings under Fire Safety and Health & Safety legislation. If the appropriate risk assessments are not in place and staff have not been appropriately trained in relation to these then the exposure is there.
It is worthy of note that the suggested penalties in the current guidance under the legislation are that fines should be up to 10% of turnover. This is much higher than has ever been the case in any previous such prosecution. In addition, the court may order the organisation in question to advertise their failings in every national newspaper, which would be both expensive and extremely damaging
to reputations.
The advice to organisations, therefore, must be to carry out a full review of food, fire and workplace safety measures to make sure they are up to scratch. The risks of prosecution have always been there, but the penalties have just become a whole lot more serious in respect of problems that lead to a fatality.
