Causing Serious Harm in UK Law

We have already referred to the fact that significant risk of two matters must be shown before life imprisonment or imprisonment for public protection becomes obligatory, that is the commission of a further specified offence and the causing of serious harm thereby.

The huge variety of offences in Schedule 15, includes many which, in themselves, are not suggestive of serious harm. Repetitive violent or sexual offending at a relatively low level without serious harm does not of itself give rise to a significant risk of serious harm in the future. There may, in such cases, be some risk of future victims being more adversely affected than past victims but this, of itself, does not give rise to significant risk of serious harm.

So also if he participates by encouragement or assistance in any other unlawful act which all sober and reasonable people would realise carried the risk of some harm (not necessarily serious) to another, and death in fact results: R v Church [1965] 1 QB 59, approved in Director of Public Prosecutions v Newbury [1977] AC 500 and very recently re-affirmed in R v F (J) & E (N) [2015] EWCA Crim 351; [2015] 2 Cr App R 5.

What matters is whether D2 encouraged or assisted the crime, whether it be murder or some other offence. He need not encourage or assist a particular way of committing it, although he may sometimes do so. Knowledge or ignorance that weapons generally, or a particular weapon, is carried by D1 will be evidence going to what the intention of D2 was, and may be irresistible evidence one way or the other, but it is evidence and no more.

However, the issue under s.117D(2)(c)(ii) is whether the offender has been convicted of ‘an offence’ which has caused serious harm. These offences usually result in a prison sentence because identity fraud is regarded as a serious matter; but that cannot, of itself, be enough to satisfy the requirement of causing ‘serious harm’.

To say that he is responsible because he ought not to have been on the road is to confuse criminal responsibility for the serious offence of being uninsured with criminal responsibility for the infinitely more serious offence of killing another person. The escalating offences of common assault, assault occasioning actual bodily harm, and causing grievous bodily harm are but simple examples; there are many more.

The link between the offending act of downloading these indecent images and the possible harm which might be done to children is too remote to satisfy the requirement that it be this Appellant's re-offending which causes the serious harm.