Is everything in the right proportion?

摘要

Since February 2016, courts have applied the Sentencing Council's definitive guideline for sentencing health and safety offences. Its objective is to ensure that fines are proportionate to the overall means of the offender and reflect the seriousness of the offence. However, the outcome in recent cases suggests that the way the guideline is applied fails to adequately reflect the means of "very large organisations", especially when compared to fines passed down to medium and large companies. Part of the reason for this is that the guideline offers little advice to judges when sentencing companies whose turnover "very greatly exceeds the threshold for large organisations".