“Air of the sinister”

As the debate goes on about the necessity for legally defined health and safety duties for directors, the Mirror newspaper, reporting on the inquest into the death of Mark Wright in an explosion at a Flintshire metal scrapyard in 2005, concluded last week that: “This tragedy again shows that legally binding health and safety duties should be imposed on company directors — so someone faces the music when rules are broken.”

Wright suffered 90% burns after he was told to put more than 3000 small air-freshener aerosols, containing 35 litres of highly combustible propellant, into a crusher at Deeside Metals in Saltney, Flintshire. The jury at the inquest into his death heard about a catalogue of failures leading up to the incident: Wright wasn’t properly trained, he had no protective clothing, the cans were not labelled as hazardous, risk assessments were ignored, the waste drums and sealed containers were accepted at the yard on the basis of unsubstantiated verbal assurances from the haulier, only superficial tests were carried out on the canisters to see what they contained.

The waste transfer note, signed by both the driver collecting the waste and the yard manager, didn’t mention the aerosols; Cheshire coroner Nicholas Rheinberg said there was an “air of the sinister” around this omission.

The jury returned a narrative verdict; a verdict of unlawful killing requires the jury to identify, beyond all reasonable doubt, an individual they hold responsible, and the decision must be unanimous.

According to the Mirror, the Crown Prosecution Service has indicated it cannot bring manslaughter charges because of conflicting evidence from the driver and company manager. But reaction to the case seems to provide anecdotal evidence of a the media’s — and public’s — desire to see named individuals, and not just corporate entities, held to account in cases of serious injuries or deaths at work.

As the Mirror puts it, “there are several people whose actions contributed to Mark's death that day — yet none is likely to pay for this tragedy.”

The public desire to “make someone pay” isn’t new, but high-profile cases such as these lend weight to calls for legal directors’ duties, especially since the Corporate Manslaughter Act fell far short of what many people wanted to see in terms of sanctions against individuals.

Jocelyn