THE HEALTH AND SAFETY EXECUTIVE will warmly welcome comments on
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its discussion document, Preventing at-work road traffic incidents Copies can be obtained online at www.hsebooks.comk, or from HSE Books on 01782 881165. The closing date for comments is 25 May.
The group's terms of reference are: establish accurate casualty statistics for work-related accidents; establish their main causes; promote a public debate on how to prevent them; agree minimum health and safety management standards for employers; propose non-legislative mechanisms for dovetailing road traffic taw with health and safety at work law; propose mechanisms for liaison between those who enforce traffic law and those who enforce health and safety at work law.
The proposals have to be read in conjunction with a separate set of ideas from the Law Commission, which are being considered by the Home Secretary, Jack Straw, and which could become law after the general election. They affect all industries, but in the road haulage industry they make it easier to prosecute anyone in a firm, from managing director to tea boy, responsible for sending a vehicle on to the road in an unsafe condition.
Peter Sewell, training officer at the FM explains. In the past it has been very hard to identify a direct line of responsibility in a large company for some major disasters, like the Kings Cross fire or the sinking of the Herald of Free Enterprise. What the proposals before Mr Straw do is abolish the old charge of Involuntary manslaughter and replace it with two new offences: reckless killing, where a life sentence can be handed out if someone knowingly sends out a vehicle in an unsafe condition and it is involved in a fatal accident; and killing by gross carelessness, where an unsafe vehicle is sent out unknowingly but in such a condition that another person might reasonably have
expected it to be unsafe. The maximum penalty for this will be 10 years."