Stark v Post Office

Regulation 6(1) of the Provision and Use of Work Equipment Regulations 1992 imposes an absolute and continuing duty. An employer must ensure that work equipment is in an efficient state, in efficient working order and in good repair. The duty concerns the required condition of the equipment, rather than the reasonableness of the employer’s maintenance system. Accordingly, a latent and undiscoverable defect which causes equipment to cease working efficiently establishes a breach. European directives prescribing minimum health-and-safety standards do not require domestic legislation to be construed as lowering a more stringent national standard.

The claimant, a delivery postman, was seriously injured when the front-brake stirrup of an employer-provided bicycle fractured and lodged in the front wheel. The defect was undiscoverable by routine or rigorous inspection. The bicycle was in its fourteenth year, although the employer’s usual replacement policy operated after ten years.

His Honour Judge Cracknell in the Kingston-upon-Hull County Court dismissed the claim. There was no appeal from his finding that the employer had not been negligent. The appeal concerned only whether the defective bicycle breached regulation 6(1) of the Provision and Use of Work Equipment Regulations 1992.

1. Appeal allowed unanimously. Lord Justice Waller, with whom Lord Justice Robert Walker agreed, held that regulation 6(1) imposed an absolute duty. Judgment was entered for the claimant, with damages to be assessed.

2. The regulation requires the employer to secure a result: that work equipment is in an efficient state, in efficient working order and in good repair. It does not merely require the employer to adopt and carry out a reasonable system of servicing, inspection or replacement. The bicycle was not in efficient working order when its brake stirrup fractured. The employer was therefore in breach, even though the defect could not have been discovered by inspection and the employer was not negligent.

3. The court treated the wording as materially the same as wording construed in Galashiels Gas Co Ltd v Millar [1949] AC 275 and related House of Lords authorities. Those authorities supported the conclusion that the statutory language describes an achieved condition, not merely the means used to maintain it. The breadth of regulation 6(1), and the absence of a criminal-law defence equivalent to one in earlier legislation, supplied no basis for inserting a qualification such as reasonable practicability.

4. The Work Equipment Directive 89/655 and the Framework Directive set minimum requirements. They did not prohibit the United Kingdom from retaining or imposing a higher standard of protection. A purposive construction of implementing legislation therefore did not justify departing from the regulation’s clear language.

• Court of Appeal: allowed the claimant’s appeal and entered judgment for him: [2000] ICR 1013.
• Kingston-upon-Hull County Court: His Honour Judge Cracknell dismissed the claim, finding no negligence and no breach of statutory duty.