E-mail this to a friend
Print this
Risk assessment
14 November 2007
Lloyd v Ministry of Justice, HHJ Foster QC, RCJ 26/10/2007 2007 EWHC 2475 (QB) - The duty to provide employees with information about the circumstances of their workplace.
The claimant prison officer suffered injury as a result of an act of violence of a prisoner.
The prisoner was on remand for robbery with a firearm. He had been in prison on 2 previous occasions and, whilst there, had been subject to 20 adjudications for violent incidents, 14 of which involved assault or attempted assault on prison officers. None of the prison officers giving evidence in the case had seen such a bad record of violence previously.
The history sheet by the prisoner’s cell which records recent incidents gave no indication of the prisoner’s propensity to assault prison officers. The judge found that the simple “warning” of the history of assaulting POs” would have sufficed.
The Court found that the duty is on the employer to keep his employee reasonably safe and in this instance the responsibility was to alert prison officers to a particular risk, namely the prisoner’s long history of violence towards POs. If that had occurred the approach of the officers on the day of the assault would have differed in that they would not have entered the cell without ordering the prisoner to stand against the wall with his hands exposed and then, armed with a shield, he could have easily been pinned back in the event of trouble.
In conclusion, the employers failed to provide the employee with a safe system of work and exposed him to a risk that was both foreseeable and unnecessary.