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Legal Eagle

Miscellaneous

Q: Health and Safety Regulations

I want to open a fringe club in London, but am concerned about the health and safety requirements. Do the same regulations apply throughout the country?

A: Some do and some do not. The health and safety requirements applicable to non-domestic premises is a huge topic in itself. For example, an action for injury to person or property due to defective, unhealthy or unsafe premises may lie at common law in negligence or nuisance. The same common law duty of care to persons entering a private members’ club applies as to any other public or semi-public premises. Then there is a substantial body of statute law applicable to particular types of premises such as factories, offices and shops (presumably your club will have an office), as well as legislation of a more general nature. This includes the Occupiers’ Liability Acts of 1957 and 1985, the Defective Premises Act 1972, the Control of Pollution Act 1974, the Environmental Protection Act 1990, the Clean Air Act 1993 and various public health legislation, plus a large volume of subsidiary statutory regulations such as, for example, fire regulations and special regulations relating to food hygiene. Closer to home, there is a requirement under the Theatres Act 1968 for licences to be obtained from the relevant local authority
for public performances of plays and for public music, singing and dancing, which the local authority will not issue unless satisfied that health and safety regulations have been complied with.

However, as to there being territorial differences in different parts of the country affecting your club premises, these are certainly possible under the Private Places of Entertainment (Licensing) Act 1967, which relates to premises used for dancing, music or any other entertainment which is not public entertainment but is promoted for private gain (of which there is a lengthy and complex definition).

I imagine you would fall within it. Under this Act, each London borough or other local authority throughout the country can itself decide whether or not to ‘adopt’ the application of the Act, and, if it does, no such premises can be used for entertainment unless licensed by the council under the Act, subject to such terms and conditions as each such individual council may in its discretion see fit to impose.

To this extent, therefore, there may well be differences between different areas of local government, some of which may not have adopted the Act at all and some of which may customarily impose different conditions to others, although one would expect the differences to be of a comparatively minor nature. Certainly the conditions are likely to address matters such as fire regulations, emergency exit routes and other aspects of health and safety.

There is also a large body of statute law and subsidiary regulations which is confined to Greater London and, separately, the City of London, as distinct from other parts of the country, some of which relates to matters of health and safety. Local authorities generally are invested with very wide statutory powers in relation to matters of public health and safety, so it is hardly surprising that there are variations in how those powers are exercised.

Your enquiry is so broadly based that it is not practicable to be more specific. If you want specific advice, you should seek it from a building surveyor or other specialist consultant in matters of health and safety requirements for club premises, and you should expect there to be minor variations between different areas of local government, both as to the extent of regulatory requirements and as to the manner in which they are applied in practice.

First published 1994