Page 4 - Best Practice in Travel Risk Management 2019 - Forum Findings

The Future of Travel Risk Forum by beTravelwise
2
FOUR
LEGAL
POINTS
Four salient points of law that apply to travel and the hazards and risks of travel were covered by Charles Parry, barrister and legal advisor to beTravelwise.
Standards, investigation and enforcement
The impact of English law on travel risk management (TRM) requires an understanding of how the legal position is changing, says Charles Parry, barrister and legal advisor
to beTravelwise.
On the one hand, there is the established idea that parliament legislates to set standards,
that the executive (civil servants and ministers) gives effect to the statutes, that judges interpret the law and that a jury decides the facts
of any case.
On the other, there is an increasing trend to delegate powers to regulatory bodies that avoid independent scrutiny.
The benefits of having a jury, an independent and randomly selected group of citizens,
to decide the facts of a case are important because legal arguments are presented and won on three levels - intellectual, emotional and political.
This is particularly so as judges have lacked political independence and have been subservient to the executive in the recent past,
says Parry. In contrast, his experience over
50 years is that jurors do understand legal arguments and do reach the correct decision.
For example, there is no point in prosecuting Greenpeace for damaging a field of maize as
a jury will be slow to convict because they will sympathise with the political element. While the judge may say breaking down a crop has caused damage to the farmer, the jury alone has the right to decide what the facts are.
But the move towards regulations and secondary enforcing bodies has been driven by the need to save money means that in many areas the legal right to have a jury decide the facts may not be present.
Parliament has legislated to allow the executive to make regulations and to set up secondary bodies to codify and enforce them. These bodies set the rules, the penalties, audit compliance, prosecute and decide on the sanctions.
The Health and Safety Executive, while it operates under primary legislation, is influenced by the way these other bodies regulate their sectors and there is evidence of where it has tried to circumvent the courts to get its own way.