Safety Hazards in UK Law

The Court must be careful to place itself in the position of the person charged with the duty and to consider what he or she should have reasonably anticipated as a natural and probable consequence of neglect, and not to give undue weight to the fact that a distressing accident has happened, or that witnesses, in the witness box, are prone to express regret, ex post facto, that they did not take some step, which it is now realised would definitely have prevented the accident.

Where, however, there is evidence which is accepted by the court as establishing a sound commercial accounting practice conflicting with no statute, that normally is the end of the matter. The court adopts the practice, applies it and decides the case accordingly.

At the top of the scale of course, come the carefully planned abductions where the victim is used as a hostage or where ransom money is demanded. Such offences will seldom be met with less than eight years' imprisonment or thereabouts. Where violence or firearms are used, or there are other exacerbating features such as detention of the victim over a long period of time, then the proper sentence will be very much longer than that.

The photographs show a staircase of a kind that one might find in hundreds of old buildings across the country. It looks very much like one of the examples given by Laws LJ in Alker of a hazard that is not in a state of disrepair, namely "a very steep stairway with no railings". Given the narrowness of the tread and the steepness of the flight of steps, particularly where it turns the corner, I have little doubt that, without a handrail, it was a hazard.