Deans Court Regulatory Team Secures Conditional Discharge in Health and Safety Case

Nicholas Courtney and Joseph Hart (instructed by Greenwoods, London) secured a conditional discharge for the Defendant company (a charity), who pleaded guilty to a Section 3 HASAWA offence arising out of a serious injury to a pupil at their special school. The prosecution resulted from the traumatic amputation of the boy’s index finger on the sixth day of operation of a newly built school, but the Trafford Magistrates accepted that the combination of the company’s general highly positive attitude to health and safety, its positive good character and the uses to which any financial penalty would otherwise be put, allowed them to draw back from the financial penalty that would usually follow in such a case.