The Defendant was headmaster of the school where the victim was a pupil who fell down a set of steps to the playground and subsequently died from his injuries. The Defendant had been headmaster for 29 years at the time of the accident and the school’s health and safety record had been excellent throughout this period. There had been no previous accidents on the steps in question over the years, despite being used by pupils consistently in the same way as they had been by the victim.
The Court of Appeal held that in any prosecution under the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974, the prosecution must prove that there is a real, not hypothetical risk of the accident occurring. There was no requirement under the Act to insure against accidents which were merely hypothetical or fanciful. While there is no objective standard which can be said to apply in every case, most cases will have important factors which must be taken into account by the jury. Where a risk is part of everyday life, it is less likely that it will be able to be argued that a person was exposed to risk by the conduct of the operations in question. The trivial ordinary risk evident in everyday life was merely a simple fact of life. Another relevant consideration would be the lack of previous accidents in circumstances which occurred day after day. In this particular case this was particularly important as there had been a period of 29 years prior to the accident in which the set of circumstances which had led to the accident had taken place over and over again without incident. Unless it could be said that the victim had been exposed to real risk by the conduct of the school, then no question of the reasonable practicality of measures designed to avoid that risk arose.