effective within two months. However no date has yet been set for the introduction of vicarious liability that benefits those who raise concerns in the workplace.
The amendments made by the ERRA to the whistleblowing legislation are piecemeal and enacted without a full review of the effectiveness of PIDA. When they come into force, the vicarious liability provisions will be beneficial to whistleblowers bullied or harassed by co-workers. However, it is regrettable that a public interest duty is being introduced at a time when recent reports concerning patient suffering and mismanagement have demonstrated the value of workplace knowledge. Overall, workers who take the brave step of blowing the whistle are now in a worse position following the enactment of the ERRA.
Health and Safety
Changes
In late 2012, the Coalition slipped a new amendment into the ERR Bill at the eleventh hour. To the untrained eye, it would seem like a technical amendment, and indeed for many, its wide-ranging implications only became clear after the Institute of Employment Rights published briefings on the topic on our website.
The government ' s plan was to abolish Section 47 of the Health and Safety at Work Act 1976, which would remove employers ' 114-year-old civil liability for their staff ' s health and safety in the workplace- a law set down in Victorian times.
Originally, the proposal was thrown out by the Lords, but it was eventually pushed through the Houses of Parliament and was made law in the ERRA.
Criticism
Once this law comes into effect, workers who are injured during an accident at work- and the families of the deceased, killed at work- will have the onus to prove that their employer was in breach of health and safety regulations. Currently, the burden of proof falls on the employer to prove they were not negligent and the accident was unavoidable.
Since the employer normally holds the evidence to show whether or not they are in breach of health and safety law, the current method of obtaining evidence against claims of negligence makes perfect sense. But once it is the claimant who must provide proof for negligence, a bizarre and perverted course of justice will be forced upon employees. It will now be their responsibility to approach the employer in question, and request for them to hand over the very evidence that will land them on the losing side of tribunal claim.
As Thompson ' s Solicitors said in its briefing entitled Return to the Dark Satanic Mills: the end of civil liability in health and safety:
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