Life and limb

In this article it is my intention to review trends and developments in the enforcement of health and safety law on the police service and to argue that the consequences of the burden of proof make its use manifestly unsuitable for regulating police operational practice in terms of its consequences to non-employees. This operates against a confused landscape of Home Office inertia and inappropriate use of health and safety law. A recent consultation on a new code of professional standards for police officers emphasises this continuing trend.

The article details these areas, firstly by considering the development of health and safety law in relation to employees, its application to the police service, the interpretation of the “reverse” burden of proof, inappropriate prosecution of the police service and finally a discussion of the government’s misguided proposals to label breaches of health and safety law by police officers as gross misconduct in the consultation on the code of professional standards.

Over the last thirty years if is fair to say that society has, rightly, become increasingly concerned with the protection of the individual from the excesses of corporations in the field of employment. Until relatively recently prosecutions for corporate wrongdoing were relatively rare and this area has prompted much political debate. The causes of deaths and injuries at work were shown to be linked to the pressures of the profit-economy system. Slapper (1999) found that in case studies of deaths at work (in incidents from all other the country, and over a three year period), 60 per cent of the deaths were directly attributable to the pressure of the profit-system economy. Thus the work practice being used, the disregard for public safety equipment or training, were the result not of ignorance but of an unwillingness or inability to pay the necessary extra in order that the work would be safe. Prosecutions lead to improvements in health and safety performance. The cost to UK industry of failures in health and safety is approximately £18 billion per year, not to mention the terrible personal cost to victims. Health and Safety legislation is intended to deal with the operation of the complexities of an industrial society and it is right that employers have a duty to employees.

The anomalous situation whereby the police were excluded from these provisions was corrected in 1997 by the Police (Health and Safety) Act with police officers being treated as employees of their chief officer. The responsibility of the chief officer for the health and safety of police officers is now uncontroversial. Whilst many would argue that more could be done, policing is a high risk occupation and much progress has been achieved since the change in the law.

A number of cases demonstrate the difficulty in extending the duty to all persons who may be affected by the operation of the policing function. On July 17 2006 following the completion of the review into the circumstances surrounding the death of Jean Charles de Menezes, Stephen O`Doherty, senior lawyer from the CPS Special Crime Division announced, ”he was, satisfied that there is sufficient evidence to prosecute the Office of Commissioner of Police for an offence under sections 3 and 33 of the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 of failing to provide for the health, safety and welfare of Jean Charles de Menezes on 22nd July 2005”.

Health and Safety legislation was used unsuccessfully, at a cost of £3 million, to prosecute the Metropolitan Police when former Commissioners, Lord Stevens and Lord Condon were prosecuted for breaches of section 2 of the Health and Safety at Work Act etc.1974. This was after a lengthy investigation into whether the Metropolitan Police had sufficiently protected police officers from the dangers of falling from or through roofs whilst assisting in the apprehension of suspects. The following incidents were referred to in the course of the prosecution case:

(a) On October 24 1999, PC Kulwant Sidhu was