Afternoon All!

I've just been doing some reading up on the very lengthy SC Guidance on the proposed guidelines for the Courts when sentencing organsiations and individuals who have been found guilty of a H&S / Food / Corp Mans offence.

I am fairly sure I understand the guidelines now. But what I am slightly confused about is how this would affect the H&S Offences Act 2008?

Do the penalties that are already laid out in this guidance no longer apply if the SC Guidelines are put into practice? I believe H&S Offences raised the fine to £20k for lower Courts?

Be good to hear from anyone who understands this more in depth than me!

Thanks everyone in advance

What the legislation describes is the MAXIMUM penalties available to a court if a person is found guilty. Courts rarely impose these maximum penalties except in few cases where they are mandatory (eg murder carries mandatory life imprisonment). What the Sentencing Council Guidance does is gives judges an idea of what penalties to impose in various cases. Basically the guidance sets out a standard penalty for a standard offence, and then the judge looks at the mitigation offered by the defendant and reduces the penalty by a suitable amount. He then looks at the aggravating factors which allow him to increase the penalty. They then come up with a “fair” penalty for that case.
The Sentencing Council Guidance on H&S offences states that if business causes someone’s death then the standard fine should be £100 000. The judge can then modify it up or down depending on the circumstances of the case. If the case was of very rich company that cynically caused the death of a member of the public the fine could be in the millions.

James
You are thinking of the changes that have just been brought in by the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012. This has given the magistrate’s courts the power to set unlimited fines for any ‘triable either way’ offences including those under HSWA.

If there are two pieces of legislation that contradict one another (and there is nothing about saving earlier bits of legislation in the new legislation) it assumed that the new legislation implicitly repeals the older legislation.