Day 131 - 06 Jun 95 - Page 55
1 Q. There are various expressions that have been put into the
2 Health and Safety at Work Act?
3 A. That is right, yes.
4
5 Q. "So far as is reasonably practicable", "so far as is
6 practicable"?
7 A. Yes.
8
9 Q. And "best practical means"?
10 A. Yes.
11
12 Q. "So far as is practicable", it says under that that this is
13 a stricter standard and that cost is not to be taken into
14 account -- "the cost, time and trouble involved"?
15 A. Yes.
16
17 Q. What kind of safety features that might be relevant to
18 McDonald's would that apply to?
19 A. Fall within the "as far as is practicable", do you
20 mean, or "reasonably practicable"?
21
22 Q. Yes.
23 A. Well, the whole of safety features are conditioned by
24 "reasonably practicable", not "practicable". If you read
25 the Health and Safety at Work Act, when you talk about "so
26 far as is practicable", that refers to clean air measures
27 and pollution control measures; in other words, is the
28 technology available to do it? But "so far as is
29 reasonably practicable" conditions all the work that
30 McDonald's do -- and, indeed, everybody else.
31
32 MR. JUSTICE BELL: The term "so far as is reasonably
33 practicable" could be a red herring, because that is in
34 relation to criminal liability, which may be quite
35 different from what a reasonable employer would choose to
36 do?
37 A. Well, indeed, my Lord. As you all well know, it is the
38 wording for the general duty of care under section 2, the
39 overall duty of care that a company has. In practice,
40 there are within that other standards; for instance,
41 machinery is an absolute standard, because that has been
42 developed by case law and so on. But the general term
43 "reasonably practicable" would be used within normal
44 safety work, safety measures.
45
46 MR. MORRIS: When you said that machinery is an absolute
47 standard, does that mean -----
48 A. Machinery guarding is an absolute standard, yes.
49
50 Q. What do you mean -- sorry?
51 A. The provision of guards for a machine to stop people
52 touching and moving parts of that machine which may be
53 dangerous, because it was included in the original
54 Factories Act, section 14, which says, off the top of my
55 head: "Thou shalt guard every dangerous part of a machine",
56 is not conditioned by "reasonably practicable". We could
57 argue now that the new machinery regulations have altered
58 it, but the courts would still interpret it that it must be
59 guarded.
60
