The Occupiers’ Liability Act 1957 is an Act of Parliament which concerns the liability of occupiers and others to those individuals who are lawfully on their land. You would lawfully be on an occupier’s land if, for example, you were a potential customer visiting a shop, a member of a gym, or a patient attending your GP’s surgery. The Act regulates the liability of occupiers for injuries caused to lawful visitors, as well as for damage caused to any goods, as a result of “dangers due to the state of the property or (due) to things done or omitted to be done there”.
It is not only occupiers who may be liable to lawful visitors, but also those who have control over premises. For example, the landlord of a property may not be in physical occupation of it, but nevertheless he is likely to owe a duty to ensure that the property is safe for visitors, as he is in control of it.
The duty on those who are in occupation or control of premises is to “take such care as in all the circumstances of the case is reasonable to see that the visitor will be reasonably safe in using the premises for the purposes for which he is invited or permitted by the occupier to be there” (section 2(2)). This is important. If you are permitted to be in a supermarket in order to look at groceries, it may be negligent of the supermarket to leave crushed fruit lying around on the floor for hours, as you could slip on this. However, if you come dashing into the supermarket on a skateboard and lose control of it before falling and injuring yourself, it is unlikely that the supermarket would be liable for this. This is because you would not be using the premises “for the purpose for which” the supermarket has permitted you to be there.
The Act expressly provides that occupiers must be prepared for children to be less careful than adults, and that an occupier should expect that a person in the exercise of his calling will appreciate and guard against any special risks ordinarily incident to it (section 2(3)). What this means is that if, for example, you live in a house with a chimney and call upon the services of a chimney sweep, you would expect the chimney sweep to guard against the risk of falling down the chimney, as this is a risk ordinarily incident to the exercise of his particular calling. The same could be said of normal risks faced by electricians, gasmen and so on.
The Act also states that if damage is caused to a visitor which the visitor was warned about by the occupier, the warning alone will not absolve the occupier of liability, unless it was enough to enable the visitor to be reasonably safe. If you see a warning in a gym of a slippery floor but you must use the floor anyway to get to the spa, and then you slip on the floor and seriously injure yourself, a court may take the view that the warning in itself was not enough to absolve the gym owner of liability. This is because if the floor was so dangerous, a court may decide that the gym owner should not have let you step on it at all, and should instead have closed it off, instead of merely warning you that the floor was slippery. On the other hand, if there is a treadmill in the same gym which carries a warning that it is defective and should not be used, and you go ahead and use it and fall off, the warning may well be enough to absolve the gym owner of blame for the accident. The owner would argue that he did enough to ensure that you would be safe by placing the warning on the defective machine, and he cannot reasonably be expected to have done more than that.
The Act further provides that an owner does not have an obligation to a visitor in respect of risks the visitor willingly accepts as his own. So if you invite a fire-eater to your home for a children’s party and the fire-eater burns himself, it is unlikely you would be held liable, as the fire-eater will probably be held to have accepted the risk of being burnt as his own.
This is a complicated area of law, so please consult one of the solicitors in our directory for further advice and assistance.