Timber!

This article is the stupidest thing I’ve ever read. Not the law – although it’s easy to have doubts when the National Trust are prosecuted for letting one of their six million trees fall down – it’s the terrible journalism. What this article really says is… send your employees go-karting and if one of them is killed your company will be fined millions of pounds. This is rubbish, and ignores the legislation completely. Can it really be said that if you book your employees a day out with a respectable outdoor pursuits company – and maybe even double check that they’re insured and have a health & safety policy – and someone is killed that the company is guilty of a gross breach of its duty of care? Will any juries really come to this conclusion? No. The article is really a disguised advert for Croner Consulting, so that they can sell Health & Safety solutions to panicked employers. In fact, it’s a bit like this other Times article which is a scare-mongering disguised advert for Peninsula, a similar company. It contains at least one legal error – can you spot it? I used to like the Times, but some of their recent articles make me want to vomit.