MSE News: 'Family tax': Dad's outrage as Ryanair tries to seat 3yo away from family

tain

peachyprice wrote: »

There is a law regarding the supply of PPE on a building site. An employer can/will/has been prosecuted for not providing appropriate safety equipment. There is no comparison.

I think people need a better understanding of our health and safety laws as it seems there are perfectly good arguments being put forward, and they're being refuted with little or no understanding as to why they're entirely incorrect in their assumptions.


Our health and safety laws are largely based around the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974. This Act is what we call an enabling act - it isn't a list of do's and don't's (although there are some). It simply says 'you should do everything you can to make your business safe'. We then have Regulations that sit beneath this Act which do say a bit more about what you do and don't do.

That is it's main goal - not to tell you how to make your business safe, but just to tell you to do it as best as you reasonably can. Should something then go wrong and someone gets injured or falls ill, then you as a business will need to prove that you did everything that was reasonable. The onus is on the business to prove this - it is not on the government to prove they did something wrong.

I think this is what people are misunderstanding. Most laws work by saying 'don't steal something', so if someone then steals something, they can point directly to the law they have breached.

However there is no direct law for a lot of health and safety actions, so it's always a matter of interpretation.


Should this parent/child thing go to court, there would need to be a few things discussed to work out if the airlines are breaching the law.

1. If they had a duty of care in the first place (this is a certainty - I can tell you now that they 100% do have a duty of care).
   
2. If that duty of care was breached (this is up for discussion. Did the airline do as much as they could for their passenger safety? As far as was reasonable?)
   
3. If there was a loss as a result of that breach (this would be fairly straightforward should something have happened to a child that has been separated from the parent).

Any action brought under the Health and Safety at Work Act is likely to come under this kind of scrutiny. As you can see - it's totally ambiguous and nothing says do or don't do in it. Hence this entire discussion.

I'm happy for people to discuss the second point above - whether a breach in health and safety occurred. But the other two points are solid and can't be refuted. For instance - the airline cannot say that it was the parent's fault as they didn't pay the extra money. You cannot shirk your duty of care in lieu of payment. There is always a duty of care.

tain

BTW this is all very trimmed down and brief, so please forgive me where I've generalised far more than I should have.

Pollycat

tain wrote: »

Are you being purposefully obtuse? No one can say how the law is applied to a specific situation until a test is put through the courts.

Murder is against the law of this land.
Ditto a number of other offences.

Is there a law against airlines seating children away from their parents?

Pollycat

tain wrote: »

For someone who criticised assumptions earlier, you're making HUGE assumptions here.

You have no idea what the family affected did. None what so ever. They could be speaking to lawyers as we speak, or on the phone to the HSE ready to bust out huge legal action.

Despite all of this, publicity is an essential tool in the process of law. The public need to scrutinise organisations and hold them to account. This is particularly important when we are discussing multi-billion pound organisations with a legal team big enough to make anyone in the world scared.

Nor do you.

I know what I think is more likely for them to have done.

tain

Pollycat wrote: »

Murder is against the law of this land.
Ditto a number of other offences.

Is there a law against airlines seating children away from their parents?

Lol. I'll leave you to muster in your own ignorance. It's probably quite boring for everyone else to read.

duchy

tain wrote: »

Let me try and summarise my views:

- Seating an infant away from their parents, against the wishes of the parent, could very feasibly be a risk to the health and/or safety of the child. This is an entirely foreseeable situation.

.

Indeed - infants (as defined by the CAA ) are children who have yet to reach their second birthday.

Parents can choose to pay just an admin charge and have the child on their lap -OR they can choose to pay for a seat for the infant.

Responsible parents would probably pay for a seat (there's a fair bit of research confirming the obvious that a child secured in their own seat is safer than held by a parent in the incidence of turbulence or a "bad" landing - the parent who sees no need to pay for a seat is probably the same one who doesn't want to pay for specific seat allocation too.

There's a danger of mixing up parents who put safety first rather than moneysaving first. Most of the rest is pure hyperbole.

NFH

duchy wrote: »

Responsible parents would probably pay for a seat (there's a fair bit of research confirming the obvious that a child secured in their own seat is safer than held by a parent in the incidence of turbulence or a "bad" landing - the parent who sees no need to pay for a seat is probably the same one who doesn't want to pay for specific seat allocation too.

No, it is not the responsibility of parents to allocate appropriate seating. It is the responsibility of the airline (as confirmed by the above CAA guidelines) to do so. There should be no surcharge for an airline to comply with CAA guidelines regarding health and safety. A responsible airline would seat children next to their parents without a surcharge.

Pollycat

tain wrote: »

Lol. I'll leave you to muster in your own ignorance. It's probably quite boring for everyone else to read.

I guess the answer to my question is 'no, there isn't a law' then? :rotfl:

tain

Pollycat wrote: »

I guess the answer to my question is 'no, there isn't a law' then? :rotfl:

Kind of embarrassed for you here mate. Can't even read the longest and most obvious post in this entire thread.

tain

duchy wrote: »

Indeed - infants (as defined by the CAA ) are children who have yet to reach their second birthday.

Parents can choose to pay just an admin charge and have the child on their lap -OR they can choose to pay for a seat for the infant.

Responsible parents would probably pay for a seat (there's a fair bit of research confirming the obvious that a child secured in their own seat is safer than held by a parent in the incidence of turbulence or a "bad" landing - the parent who sees no need to pay for a seat is probably the same one who doesn't want to pay for specific seat allocation too.

There's a danger of mixing up parents who put safety first rather than moneysaving first. Most of the rest is pure hyperbole.

How does this sit with the airline's obligations under the Health and Safety at Work Act?