The Offices, shops and railway premises Act, 1963 / With introduction and annotations by Ian Fife and E. Anthony Machin. Being a reprint of Butterworths Annotated Legislative Service, Statutes Supplement no. 138.

  • United Kingdom
Date:
1963
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The Offices, shops and railway premises Act, 1963 / With introduction and annotations by Ian Fife and E. Anthony Machin. Being a reprint of Butterworths Annotated Legislative Service, Statutes Supplement no. 138. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    44/132 (page 26)
    No. 138.—OFFICES, SHOPS AND RAILWAY PREMISES ACT 1963 necessary, if the examination, lubrication or adjustment can only be carried out while the part is in motion. (4) Fencing provided in pursuance of the foregoing provisions of this section shall be of substantial construction, be properly maintained and be kept in position while the parts required to be fenced are in motion or use, except when any such parts are necessarily exposed for examination and for any lubrication or adjustment shown by the examination to be immediately necessary. (5) Subsection (3) of this section, and so much of subsection (4) thereof as relates to the exception from the requirement thereby imposed, shall only apply where the examination, lubrication or adjustment in question is carried out by such persons who have attained the age of eighteen as may be specified in regulations made by the Minister and all other such conditions as may be so specified are complied with. NOTES General effect of section. Sub-s. (1) imposes a duty to fence every dangerous part of machinery forming equipment of premises within the Act unless it is safe by reason of its position or construction. Sub-s. (2) provides for compliance with sub-s. (1), in certain cases, by an automatic device which prevents the operator from coming into contact with the dangerous part. Sub-s. (3) makes special provision for the exam- ination, lubrication or adjustment of moving parts, and sub-s. (4) requires fencing to be of substantial construction, to be properly maintained, and to be kept in position. Sub-s. (5) provides that the relaxation of fencing requirements in the case of examina- tion, lubrication or adjustment is only to apply in the case of such persons over 18 as may be specified by regulation. This section may be compared with the provisions of ss. 14 to 16 of the Factories Act 1961, for which see 41 Halsbury’s Statutes (2nd Edn.) 256 et seg., and Redgrave’s Factories Acts (zoth Edn.) pp. 46 e¢ seg., and the ‘“‘Introductory Note to Sections 12-16” at pp. 35 et seq. thereof. The wording of s. 17 of the present Act is plainly modelled upon that of ss. 14 to 16 of the Factories Act 1961, and where the phraseology is identical it should, itis submitted, bear the same interpretation as has been accorded to the cognate provisions of the Factories Act 1961. (As to the judicial interpretation of statutes in pari materia, see 36 Halsbury’s Laws (3rd Edn.) 403, 404). The language of ss. 14 to 16 of the Factories Act 1961 (and that of the corresponding provisions of the Factories Act 1937, which were replaced by those of the later Act) has been the subject of extensive judicial interpretation. In the notes which follow an attempt is made to provide a short exegesis of the case law relating to the factories legislation; in accord- ance with the principle cited earlier in this note, that case law is authoritative upon the interpretation of s. 17 of the present Act, save where the context may indicate that a departure from the meaning of the factories legislation is intended. Sub-s. (1): Dangerous part. The test, whether a part is a dangerous part, is whether it might be a reasonably foreseeable cause of injury to anybody acting in a way in which a human being may be reasonably expected to act in circumstances which may be reasonably expected to occur (Close v. Steel Company of Wales, Ltd., [1961] 2 All E.R. 953, H.L.). In deciding what is reasonably foreseeable both the behaviour of persons employed and the behaviour of the machine must be considered. Reasonably foreseeable behaviour on the part of persons employed includes not only prudent, alert and skilled behaviour but also reasonably foreseeable inadvertence and indolence (Mitchell v. North British Rubber Co., 1945 S.C. (J.) 69; john Summers & Sons, Lid. v. Frost, [1955] 1 All E.R. 870, H.L.). The behaviour of the machine which is here material is its normal behaviour in the ordinary course of working, and not aberrant behaviour which cannot be foreseen (Eaves v. Morris Motors, Lid., {1961} 9 full E.R g 3, Cay). Machinery. This term includes machinery not driven by mechanical power (Richard Thomas & Baldwins, Lid. v. Cummings, [1955] 1 All E.R. 285, H.L.). What is ‘‘machinery’’ may be a matter of impression. Thus, in Quintas v. National Smelting Co., Ltd., [1961] 1 All E.R. 630, C.A., the defendants operated in their factory an over- head travelling cable-way supported by stanchions, so that material might be trans- ported from one part of the factory to another. The material was placed in buckets suspended from the cable, which at one part of the route passed close to a flat roof, on which workmen were expected to come. It was held that the cable-way, regarded as a whole, was not one piece of machinery within s. 14 of the Factories Act 1937 (9 Halsbury’s Statutes (2nd Edn.) 1oog), and therefore that the whole of the cable-way need not be fenced. The mere fact that apparatus moves about the premises does not, it seems, prevent its being ‘‘machinery’’, as where a coke distributing machine travels on rails (see Dobson v. Colvilles, 1958 S.L.T. (notes) 30, and compare Quintas v. National Smelting Co., Ltd., supra, per Sellers, L.J., at [1961] 1 All E.R. 635).