New Look Retailers Ltd v London Fire & Emergency Planning Authority

Offences under Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 are sentenced by the conventional principles governing corporate safety offending. Article 32 requires a risk of death or serious injury, but it does not establish a separate scale of fines from that applicable under the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974. The fine must reflect culpability, the consequences or risk created, deterrence, and the organisation’s means. A court need not wait for death or injury before imposing a substantial fine for wholesale safety failures. An actual fire may demonstrate the gravity of a risk even where the defendant did not cause it, provided the defendant is not punished for consequences for which it was not responsible.

New Look Retailers Ltd pleaded guilty at the Crown Court to two offences under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005. The offences concerned an inadequate fire-risk assessment and inadequate employee fire-safety training at its Oxford Street department store.

A serious fire occurred at the store. The cause was unknown and the admitted breaches neither caused the fire nor caused death or injury. However, the fire exposed extensive deficiencies in escape routes, evacuation arrangements, risk assessment, and staff training. HHJ Rivlin QC imposed fines totalling £400,000.

The company appealed, contending that the judge had treated fire-safety offences as requiring higher fines than health and safety offences and had attached insufficient weight to the absence of injury, death, and causation.

1. Appeal dismissed. The aggregate fine of £400,000 was severe but not manifestly excessive.

2. The sentencing judge had applied the conventional approach to corporate safety offending. The court approved the approach described in F Howe & Sons Engineers Ltd [1992] 2 Cr App R(S) 37 and R v Balfour Beatty Rail Infrastructure Services Ltd [2006] EWCA Crim 186. A fine should reflect fault and consequences, deter future offending, and create appropriate concern among shareholders and senior management. The offender’s means are relevant, but a fine must remain proportionate to the seriousness of the offence.

3. Article 32 of the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 requires proof that a failure exposed relevant persons to a risk of death or serious injury in a fire. That threshold does not itself require fines to be set on a different scale from offences under the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974. Culpability and harm remain matters of fact and degree.

4. A court may impose a substantial fine before death or serious injury occurs. The actual fire was properly used to demonstrate the serious risk created by the admitted failures. It was not treated as an element of culpability, nor was the company punished for causing the fire or its wider consequences. The absence of injury and death remained a significant mitigating factor.

5. The sentencing guideline’s general indications for offences causing death were not a tariff or a ceiling for offences without death. Previous fines and individual decisions, including ESB Hotels Ltd [2005] EWCA Crim 132, could not provide a numerical benchmark without close regard to culpability, causation, means, mitigation, and the facts of the particular case. The extensive and longstanding failures at a large city-centre store justified the fines imposed.

• Court of Appeal (Criminal Division): Dismissed the company’s appeal against sentence: [2010] EWCA Crim 1268.
• Southwark Crown Court: HHJ Rivlin QC imposed fines of £250,000 for the inadequate risk assessment and £150,000 for inadequate employee fire-safety training, together with prosecution costs.