Danger! Danger!

Public authorities often face claims in respect of accidents on their premises. The Occupiers' Liability (Scotland) Act 1960 provides that property occupiers owe a duty to take reasonable care to ensure that a person does not suffer injury or damage by reason of any danger on his premises. But what constitutes a "danger"? This is considered by Lord Glennie in the recent case, John Dawson v Ruth Page.

The Background

Mr Dawson, a self employed courier, delivered a package to Ms Page’s cottage. Owing to extensive building works, the cottage resembled a temporarily unoccupied building site. After two unsuccessful attempts to deliver the package, Mr Dawson left the package under an oil storage tank in the garden. As he was leaving he slipped on a wet plank over a trench and injured his hand.

What is a "danger"?

Interestingly, despite the longevity of the Act, and its equivalent in England, there is little discussion in the decided cases about what constitutes a danger. The main issue tends to be about the taking of reasonable care. However Lord Glennie made the point that not everything giving rise to an accident is necessarily to be regarded as a danger requiring precautions, or at least not all the time. Irregularities in the ground may be obvious in daylight, and therefore constitute no danger, but at night the position might be different:

"If it were otherwise, every staircase and every other obstruction of any kind would constitute a danger against the risks of which there would be a duty to take precautions. That is not the law."

In the present case, all that happened was that Mr Dawson slipped on a plank. In so far as it was slippery because it was wet, its slipperiness was obvious. There was no hidden danger, nor anything to disguise any hazard. In short, there was nothing to make the plank a danger against which the occupier should have taken precautions and Mr Dawson's claim failed. As Lord Glennie comments:

"The fact that a person using the premises might not take sufficient care for his safety cannot make a danger of something that is not otherwise dangerous."

Comment

In an era when it can seem that a person can disregard his own safety and place the blame for any resulting accident onto another, this is a refreshingly common sense judgement and one which provides a good starting point for working out what precautions, if any, you require to take to meet your own obligations under the 1960 Act.