The National Insurance (Industrial Injuries) Act, 1946 / with general introduction and annotations by N.P. Shannon and Douglas Potter.

  • United Kingdom
Date:
1946
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The National Insurance (Industrial Injuries) Act, 1946 / with general introduction and annotations by N.P. Shannon and Douglas Potter. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    55/252 (page 45)
    ACT, 1946. SECTION 1 An Act to substitute for the Workmen's Compensation Acts, 1925 to 1945, a system of insurance against personal injury caused by accident arising out of and in the course of a person’s employment and against prescribed diseases and injuries due to the nature of a person's employment, and for purposes connected therewrth. [26th July, 1946.] PART INSURED PERSONS AND CONTRIBUTIONS 1. Persons to be insured.—(1) Subject to the provisions of this Act (a), all persons (0) employed (c) in insurable employment (d) shall be insured in manner provided by this Act against personal injury (e) caused on or after the appointed day (f) by accident arising out of and in the course - of such employment (g). (2) For the purposes of this Act, every employment (/) specified in Part I of the First Schedule to this Act is an insurable employment (7) unless it is an excepted employment (A), that is to say an employment specified in Part II of that Schedule : Provided that Parts I and II of that Schedule shall have effect subject to the provision made by Part III thereof for preventing anomalies (/). NOTES General effect of section.—This is the section which imposes the general obligation on workers to be insured, and which prescribes what they are to be insured against, viz., personal injury by accidents arising out of and in the course of the employment. The kinds of benefits to be derived from the insurance, and questions relating to entitle- ment to benefit, are dealt with in Part II of the Act, post. Cf. section 1 of the National Insurance Act, 1946. (a2) Subject to the provisions of this Act.—Although the present Act, broadly speaking, covers all persons working under a contract of service or apprenticeship, and there is no income limit, and no contracting-out schemes, the obligation to be insured arises only where a person falls within the provisions of the Act as to insurable employment, and the general obligation to be insured which is imposed by section 1 (1) is subject to the qualifications introduced by the subsequent provisions of the Act. Persons are, of course, only insured if they have complied with the provisions of the Act. (0) All persons.—There is no qualification on the obligation to be insured based on age, sex, or the amount of wages or salary, and the qualifications arising because of the nature of the employment depend upon the definition, or rather description, of what are “insurable employments ’”’ and what are “ excepted employments ’’, as to which see notes, ifra. (c) Employed: Employment.—tThere are no definitions in the Act of the words “‘ employed’ and “employment ’’, presumably because it was thought that it was not necessary to have a meaning for these words used by themselves because the operative words which really govern the scope of the entire Act are ‘“ employed in insurable employment ’”’, and these words have the different meanings attributed to them by Part I of the First Schedule. If, however, that Schedule is referred to, it will be observed that although under paragraph 1 of Part I there must be a contract of service or a contract of apprenticeship, in other paragraphs of the Schedule this requirement of a contract of service is not present: e.g. in paragraph 6 of the First Schedule, Part I, we find ““ Employment in Great Britain under any public or local authority constituted in Great Britain’: in paragraph 8, ““ Employment in Great Britain as a member . . . of any such fire brigade . . . as may be prescribed”. In these cases one is driven to ask what precisely is meant by “‘ employment ”’’. In the first place it may be observed, looking solely at the statute that a distinction is being drawn in some way between employment under a contract of service (as defined in paragraph 1 of Part I of the First Schedule, by which “ contract of service ’’ means contract of service or apprenticeship, whether written or oral, and whether expressed or implied) and employment not under a contract of service: compare paragraphs 1, 2, and 5 of the First Schedule, Part I, in which employment under a contract of service is required, with paragraphs 3, 4, 6, 7 and 8 thereof, where this requirement does not appear. A similar distinction appears in Part II of the First Schedule, which deals with “ excepted employments ’’ (as to which, see note (”), post) : compare paragraphs 2 and 3 with paragraphs 1, 4-8. It may be noted that the question raised here did not arise under the Workmen’s Compensation Act, 1925, because although section 1 of that Act said generally “if in any employment ”’, etc., the only persons who could claim compensation were “‘ workmen ’’, as defined by section 3, which required the employment to be under a contract of service or apprenticeship with an employer, etc. (see Willis, 37th Edn., p. 160 ef seq.).