Posted By Mike Palfrey
Am I missing something?

Reading this month's SHP I see that "in a good example of how the judiciary makes it's decision in health & safety cases" (pp16) Michelin Tyres were fined £100K. According to another contributor (K McLoughlin) "a fine should be large enough to bring the matters home to company & shareholders and taking into account £12M profits"

In the case of Ms Beckingham she was fined 50% of her salary, by any measure a huge penalty. Her "profit" would be the salary left after paying mortgage, council tax, Income Tax, NI, gas, electricity, clothes, food, travel, etc., etc. How many of use would like to loose half our take home pay?

Michelin get fined around 1% of their profits. OK no fatalities, but does anyone think any company would ever be fined 50% of profits?

Balfour Beatty made around £52M profits last year and the revised fine was only £7.5M for being instrumental in causing multiple deaths.

Should Ms Beckingham appeal?, was her fine fair and just?, will her employer pay her fine?

Discuss.

It could be any one of us if we give the wrong advice?

Mike

Posted By Doris
You are right, the fines are not representative of the negligence neither do they deter. The only way to get large companies to change is not fining them but serving sanctions, that way they have to evidence the change. This would do more for safety than any fine, what ever the size, will ever do.

Posted By J Knight
Hi folks,

was reading (may have been in SHP) about a small business that was fined 50% of its annual turnover; though the headline total was small and at a glance would look derisory.

The bloke blowing up the speed camera was jailed in effect for trying to pervert the course of justice, according to comments I read which were made by the judge. He was jailed for attempting to destroy evidence. He might have got less for a mugging, but he would maybe have got more for mugging and then perjury on top.

However, I do agree that fines don't always look as though they deter, and often they do seem paltry, but I was at a corporate manslaughter seminar and one of the speakers was a defence barrister - defended railtrack and balfour beatty for hadfield in fact - and he said that one of his rail construction clients had been fined 150K on another occasion and had had to ask for time to pay. When the judge evinced skepticism, they showed him what had happened to the share price following judgment; they really didn't have any cash. Don't know if that's true, but there may be more to this in some cases than a simple glance at headline figures may suggest.

And of course there are no sentencing rules in Scotland, hence Larkhill.

John

Posted By Raymond Rapp
Aggh!

Sincere apologies Tony, Freudian slip 'cause I was multi-tasking at the time...should have said Ms Buckingham - not good with names either!

Regards

Ray

Posted By Jeffrey Watt
If it was based on profits not turnover then the court would owe me money.

I think the devil is in the detail with sentencing. You see a headline and depending on what other info you are presented with you can either feel "that was a bit light" or " that's a bit harsh".

At first I thought Ms Beckingham had got out like a bandit with "just" a fine. On reading the courts deliberations, I wasn't so sure, she seemed to have been singled out in a situation where there were multiple latent failures by multiple people having control over the premises.

Can insurance cover a fine resulting from criminal negligene? Please advise.
Jeff

Posted By J Knight
It is an offence to offer insurance against a fine; I forget the statute. The idea is that fines are punishment, so the burden has to fall on the guilty party,

John

Posted By Merv Newman
The lady in question made a very serious professional error which led to the loss of a number of lives. As a qualified architect she should have had a reasonable professional knowledge of the risks of legionella. She cancelled the maintenance contract, including tests for legionella.

Under the howe principles the size of the fine was intended to punish her and to put the fear of bankruptcy into others who might, in the future, be thinking of cost saving in this way. (yep, you too)

This said, I do feel that the effect of this level of fine upon her life will be enormous. Ok, the loss of (5 or 6 ?) lives deserves a lot more than a slap on the risk. But as other correspondants have mentioned there is a disparity between "private" individuals and company bodies. A few million quid might hurt a very large company but no-one is going to go home crying.

That is the anomaly that needs sorting out.

A case settled in France this week concerned a company which knowingly exposed 150 employees to asbestos over a period of years (management went into denial) The MD got a 7-month suspended sentence, (jailing of managers for safety violations is quite common in France) the company was fined £50 000 plus £6 500 compensation to be paid to each of the exposed employees. That adds up to around £1 000 000 for a fairly small company.

I reckon she could appeal the size of the fine. If she can afford to.

Merv