(Extra Division – Inner House) The pursuer was injured working as an apprentice for a company operated by its sole director, the second defender. Though he was an apprentice joiner, the company’s insurance excluded (in breach of the 1969 Act) injury by electric powered woodworking machinery. The company was now liquidated, and the appellant sought to recover from the director who had failed to comply with the 1969 Act.
Held: The defenders’ appeal failed. The 1969 did not expressly make a director liable for such a failure, but equally other statutes expressly excluded liability, and again this was not the case here: ‘Where a statute imposes a duty or prohibition and where that duty or prohibition can be seen to have been imposed for the benefit of a particular group of people (in other words a duty is owed to them) then, as a matter of necessary inference, the statute may be construed as conferring a right on members of that particular group to sue on breach, as the correlative of the duty’
[2015] ScotCS CSIH – 11, 2015 GWD 5-109, 2015 SC 453, 2015 SCLR 434, [2016] Lloyd’s Rep IR 35, 2015 SLT 134, [2015] CSIH 11
Bailii
Employers’ Liability (Compulsory Insurance) Act 1969
Scotland
Citing:
Cited – Richardson v Pitt-Stanley CA 11-Aug-1994
The directors of a company did not become personally liable for damages, only because they had failed to insure the company for liability for personal injuries suffered as a result of the company’s activities, even though they may be criminally . .
Cited by:
At SCS – Campbell v Gordon SC 6-Jul-2016
The employee was injured at work, but in a way excluded from the employers insurance cover. He now sought to make the sole company director liable, hoping in term to take action against the director’s insurance brokers for negligence, the director . .
Lists of cited by and citing cases may be incomplete.
Personal Injury
Updated: 28 December 2021; Ref: scu.543675
