Health and Safety in UK Law

A reasonable man in the position of the inspector must realise that if the foundations are covered in without adequate depth or strength as required by the byelaws, injury to safety or health may be suffered by owners or occupiers of the house. The duty is owed to them—not of course to a negligent building owner, the source of his own loss. I would leave open the case of users, who might themselves have a remedy against the occupier under the Occupiers Liability Act 1957.

I would be of opinion that an action could be brought against him, in effect, for breach of statutory duty by any person for whose benefit or protection the byelaw was made. Nature of the damages recoverable and arising of the cause of action. The damages recoverable include all those which foreseeably arise from the breach of the duty of care which, as regards the council, I have held to be a duty to take reasonable care to secure compliance with the byelaws.

On the question of damages generally I have derived much assistance from the judgment (dissenting on this point, but of strong persuasive force) of Laskin C.J. in the Canadian Supreme Court case of Rivtow Marine Ltd. v. Washington Iron Works (1973) 6 W.W.R. 692, 715 and from the judgments of the New Zealand Court of Appeal (furnished by courtesy of that Court) in Bowen v. Paramount Builders (Hamilton) Ltd. and McKay, C.A. 69/75.

We can leave aside cases of personal injury or damage to other property as presenting no difficulty. It is only the damage for the house which requires consideration. In my respectful opinion the Court of Appeal was right when, in Sparham-Souter's case it abjured the view that the cause of action arose immediately upon delivery, i.e., conveyance of the defective house.

Here again, it is important to distinguish between signs of stress and signs of impending harm to health. Stress is merely the mechanism which may but usually does not lead to damage to health. If the employee or his doctor makes it plain that unless something is done to help there is a clear risk of a breakdown in mental or physical health, then the employer will have to think what can be done about it.

Unless he knows of some particular problem or vulnerability, an employer is usually entitled to assume that his employee is up to the normal pressures of the job. It is only if there is something specific about the job or the employee or the combination of the two that he has to think harder. Generally he is entitled to take what he is told by or on behalf of the employee at face value.

It appears to me that the source of his disease was the dust from both sources, and the real question is whether the dust from the swing grinders materially contributed to the disease. What is a material contribution must be a question of degree. A contribution which comes within the exception de minimis non curat lex is not material, but I think that any contribution which does not fall within that exception must be material.