Common law and statute law



Common law is law developed through legal cases rather than by Acts of Parliament. Meanwhile statute law is written down and forms Acts and Regulations. Breaches of statutory duties, that is to say, duties contained in Acts of Parliament or regulations that are enforceable by regulators, may result in civil or criminal liability. It is a criminal offence to break health and safety law. Workers may also be able to bring a civil action against an employer for compensation. However, since the change to the HSWA under the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act 2013, explained on page 16, they generally can only succeed if they can prove that physical or psychiatric injury has resulted from the employer’s negligence.



The most important common law duty with regard to health and safety is the duty of care. Employers have a duty to take reasonable care to protect their employees and their immediate family from the risk of foreseeable injury, disease or death at work.



If employers know of a health and safety risk (or should have known, based on the current state of knowledge at the time of the incident) they will be liable if an employee is injured, killed or suffers illness as a result of the risk and they failed to take reasonable care. This general duty of care is particularly important where there is no specific statutory regulation, such as when dealing with repetitive strain injury (see Chapter 8) or stress, bullying and violence (see Chapter 11).



A landmark ruling in Chandler v Cape PLC [2012] EWCA Civ 525 decided that in some circumstances, a parent company will owe a duty of care for the health and safety of workers employed by its subsidiary. This judgment may prove useful in circumstances where the employee’s employer is insolvent or no longer exists but where there is still a parent company in existence. This is a common scenario for victims of long latency diseases, i.e. where the symptoms may not emerge until many years after the initial exposure. The Chandler case concerned a victim of asbestosis. More information on asbestos can be found in Chapter 6: Hazardous substances.