Paris v Stepney BC [1950] UKHL 3

Mr Paris, effectively blind in one eye, was employed as a garage hand and suffered total blindness when a metal fragment entered his good eye while hammering a bolt. The House of Lords held that his known vulnerability increased his employer’s duty of care, requiring eye protection.

Facts

The appellant, Edward John Paris, began work for the respondents, the Mayor, Aldermen and Councillors of the Metropolitan Borough of Stepney, in May 1942 as a garage hand or fitter’s mate in the cleansing department.

He was, for all practical purposes, blind in his left eye due to war injuries suffered in 1941, although this was not known to the respondents at the time of engagement. On 22 June 1946 he was medically examined for entry to the permanent staff and superannuation scheme. The respondents’ medical officer reported on 26 July 1946 that the appellant was unfit on account of disablement, including the serious defect of his left eye. From that date the respondents were held to know that he was virtually a one‑eyed man.

On 28 May 1947, while still employed and having been given notice expiring two days later, the appellant was dismantling the chassis of a gulley‑cleaner vehicle raised some 4½ feet on a ramp. Working underneath, with his eyes level with or slightly below the part being worked on, he used a steel hammer to knock out a rusty U‑bolt holding the springs. A fragment of metal flew off and entered his right eye, destroying its sight and leaving him almost totally blind.

The work was of the same general kind he had done for about five years. The respondents supplied goggles for welders and for men using grinding machines, but not for general maintenance and repair work on vehicles. It was known that dirt sometimes fell into men’s eyes and that metal pieces might fly when bolts were removed, and individual workers occasionally took goggles from a cupboard when working under vehicles, but there was no systematic provision or requirement.

The appellant sued for negligence and breach of statutory duty, but pursued only negligence at trial. The alleged negligence was a failure to provide and require the use of suitable goggles for the appellant’s protection, particularly in light of his known one‑eyed condition. Mr Justice Lynskey found the respondents liable and awarded £5,250. The Court of Appeal reversed that decision. The appellant appealed to the House of Lords.

Issues

Main legal question

The central issue was whether an employer’s common law duty of care to an employee must take into account not only the probability of an accident occurring but also the gravity of the likely injury to that particular employee, where the employer knows of the employee’s special vulnerability.

Put more specifically, the question was whether the respondents, knowing the appellant was effectively one‑eyed, owed him a stricter duty than to two‑eyed workers, such that they should have provided and required the use of goggles for him although the general practice was not to provide goggles for this type of work.

Judgment

House of Lords order

The formal order of the House stated that the appeal was allowed. The House:

“Ordered and Adjudged, by the Lords Spiritual and Temporal in the Court of Parliament of His Majesty the King assembled, that the said Order of His Majesty’s Court of Appeal of the 27th day of October 1949, complained of in the said Appeal, be, and the same is hereby, Reversed, and that the Judgment of the Honourable Mr. Justice Lynskey of the 11th day of April 1949, thereby set aside be, and the same is hereby, Restored except in regard to the amount thereby adjudged to be recovered by the Plaintiff from the Defendants.”

The quantum of damages was left to be dealt with by the Court of Appeal, and the respondents were ordered to pay the appellant’s costs in the Court of Appeal and in the House of Lords.

Lord Simonds and Lord Morton of Henryton dissented; the majority (Lords Normand, Oaksey and MacDermott) allowed the appeal.

Reasoning of the majority

Lord Normand

Lord Normand framed the key question as whether:

“A workman is suffering, to the employer’s knowledge, from a disability which, though it does not increase the risk of an accident’s occurring while he is at work, does increase the risk of serious injury if an accident should befall him; is the special risk of injury a relevant consideration in determining the precautions which the employer should take in fulfilment of the duty of care which he owes to the workman?”

He rejected the Court of Appeal’s view, summarised in Asquith L.J.’s statement that:

“The disability can only be relevant to the stringency of the duty owed to the Plaintiff if it increases the risk to which the Plaintiff is exposed. A one-eyed man is no more likely to get a splinter or a chip in his eye than is a two-eyed man. The risk is no greater, but the damage is greater to a man using his only good eye than to a man using two good eyes; but the quantum of damage is one thing and the scope of duty is another. The greater risk of injury is not the same thing as the risk of greater injury, and the first thing seems to me to be relevant here”.

Lord Normand held that the employer’s duty is to exercise the care of the “ordinary reasonable and prudent man” and that all facts affecting what such a person would do must be considered, including both the likelihood of an accident and the seriousness of its consequences. He cited Lord Neaves in Mackintosh v. Mackintosh:

“It must be observed that in all cases the amount of care which a prudent man will take must vary infinitely according to circumstances. No prudent man in carrying a lighted candle through a powder magazine would fail to take more care than if he was going through a damp cellar. The amount of care will be proportionate to the degree of risk run and to the magnitude of the mischief that may be occasioned”.

He also referred to Lord Wright in Northwestern Utilities Limited v. London Guarantee & Accident Company Limited:

“The degree of care which that duty involves must be proportioned to the degree of risk involved if the duty should not be fulfilled”.

And he approved the statement in Salmond:

“There are two factors in determining the magnitude of a risk, the seriousness of the injury risked, and the likelihood of the injury being in fact caused”.

He concluded that the gravity of the injury and the likelihood of its occurrence are both relevant. Restricting the duty to the likelihood alone would be an “undue and artificial simplification” and would create a “cleavage between the legal conception of the precautions which a reasonable and prudent man would take, and the precautions which reasonable and prudent men do in fact take”.

On the evidence, he accepted that usual practice was not to supply goggles for such work, and that this weighed strongly against imposing such a duty in the ordinary case. However, he noted that it was practically impossible to prove general practice for one‑eyed workers and regarded Lynskey J’s decision as effectively a finding that supplying goggles to a one‑eyed man in this work was “obviously necessary”.

He emphasised the known risk of metal flying when hammering rusty bolts, the proximity and position of the worker’s eyes beneath the vehicle, and the “disastrous consequences if a particle of metal flew into his one good eye”. Although acknowledging that a two‑eyed man also ran a serious risk, he considered that “blindness is so great a calamity that even the loss of one of two good eyes is not comparable”. He held that, for a one‑eyed man, the risk of total blindness justified requiring goggles, even if the same conclusion might not necessarily follow for two‑eyed men in light of prevailing practice.

He therefore would “allow the appeal and restore the judgment of Lynskey, J.”

Lord Oaksey

Lord Oaksey expressly agreed with Lord Normand. He restated the employer’s duty:

“The duty of an employer towards his servant is to take reasonable care for the servant’s safety in all the circumstances of the case. The fact that the servant has only one eye if that fact is known to the employer and that if he loses it he will be blind is one of the circumstances which must be considered by the employer in determining what precautions if any shall be taken for the servant’s safety.”

He accepted that evidence of common practice might not be available in a case involving a one‑eyed workman and that the court must form its own view of what the notional ordinarily prudent employer would do. He posed the question whether such an employer would supply goggles to a one‑eyed workman required to knock out bolts with a steel hammer while his eye was close to and under the bolt, and considered that Lynskey J was entitled to hold that he would.

He recognised that the risk of splinters injuring the eye “may be and I think is slight” but stated that it was for the trial judge to weigh the risk and the potential damage, including the possibility that the appellant “might become a blind man if his eye was struck”. Goggles were “a simple and inexpensive precaution” and a one‑eyed man would be unlikely to refuse to wear them. He concluded that Lynskey J had properly weighed these factors and that his judgment should be restored.

Lord MacDermott

Lord MacDermott also allowed the appeal. He restated the general duty from Lord Wright in Wilsons and Clyde Coal Co. Ltd. v. English:

“to take reasonable care for the safety of his workmen”

and from Lord Herschell in Smith v. Baker & Sons:

“the contract between employer and employed involves on the part of the former the duty of taking reasonable care to provide proper appliances, and to maintain them in a proper condition, and so to carry on his operations as not to subject those employed by him to unnecessary risk.”

He emphasised that the duty is owed to the workman as an individual and must be considered in relation to the facts of the particular case.

Criticising the Court of Appeal’s approach, he observed that, if its doctrine were correct, the employer’s duty could be discharged “without regard to the gravity of the harm which is likely to fall upon the workman concerned”, so that the standard of care would be the same for all where the probability of accident was equal, regardless of the foreseeable severity of injury. He described this view as finding “no support in authority” and as “entirely alien to the character of the relationship” between employer and employee.

He pointed out that in the workshop context terms such as “risk”, “danger” and “safety” necessarily connote consequences as well as causes, noting that it is “the consequences that necessitate the precautions in this field”. He gave concrete examples: goggles for grinding machines protect eyes, not cheeks, because eye injury is more serious; special precautions against electric leakage are taken where a shock might prove fatal. From this he concluded:

“the employer’s duty to take reasonable care for the safety of his workmen is directed—and, I venture to add, obviously directed—to their welfare and for that reason, if for no other, must be related to both the risk and the degree of the injury.”

Since the duty is owed to the individual, a known circumstance that a particular workman is likely to suffer graver injury than his fellows is one which must be considered in assessing the employer’s obligation.

Turning to the evidence, he read Lynskey J’s judgment as not imposing a duty to provide goggles for all workers, but only in respect of the appellant, whose eye defect was known. Even assuming, as the Court of Appeal had, that there was no general duty to provide goggles for ordinary two‑eyed men—given that practice was generally against such provision—he considered that the additional element of the appellant’s known vulnerability altered the position. The risk of metal fragments was known and:

“His chances of being blinded were appreciably greater and blindness is an affliction in a class by itself which reasonable men will want to keep from those who work for them if there are reasonable precautions which can be taken to that end.”

He concluded that there was ample evidence to sustain a finding that the respondents failed in their duty to the appellant and would restore the trial judge’s finding as to liability.

Dissenting reasoning

Lord Simonds

Lord Simonds would have dismissed the appeal. He accepted that an employer owes a duty to each employee as an individual and that the gravity of potential damage is a relevant circumstance, rejecting the neat distinction drawn by the Court of Appeal that only greater risk of injury, not risk of greater injury, is relevant. However, he considered that another essential factor—the seriousness of the risk—had been overlooked by the trial judge.

Surveying the evidence, he found that it overwhelmingly showed that employers in similar work did not generally provide goggles for mechanics performing this type of hammering work. Witnesses of long experience had never seen goggles used for such tasks, and even the appellant did not think of the work as dangerous, explaining that:

“We had been doing it for years and never thought of it”.

While metal splinters could fly when rusty steel was hammered, there was evidence of only a very small number of minor eye injuries over many years, and no indication that the respondents knew or should have known of serious incidents.

On this basis he concluded:

“no other conclusion can be reached than that the Respondents were not under a duty to provide goggles for their workmen engaged on this work, at least if they were two-eyed men, and the reason why they were under no such duty was because the risk was not one against which a reasonable employer was bound to take precautions.”

He then asked whether, nevertheless, the respondents should have taken special precautions for a one‑eyed man. He considered that a two‑eyed man could also suffer very grave injury (including possible loss of both eyes or consequential damage to the remaining eye), and that the difference in gravity between the one‑eyed and two‑eyed cases did not justify imposing a duty in the former when none existed in the latter. He held that, starting from the accepted premise that goggles were not required for two‑eyed men because the risk was one a reasonable employer could run, there was no sufficient basis to say that goggles must be provided for one‑eyed men.

Nevertheless, he recognised that the majority took a different view and noted:

“as the majority of your Lordships are in favour of allowing the appeal, the Judgment of Lynskey J. upon liability must be restored and it will remain for the Court of Appeal to deal with the Appellant’s appeal upon the quantum of damages.”

Lord Morton of Henryton

Lord Morton also dissented. He accepted the general principle that in determining an employer’s precautions, both the likelihood of an accident and the gravity of its consequences must be considered, and drew from this that if two workers face the same likelihood of accident but one will suffer more serious consequences, it may be reasonable to take additional precautions for the more vulnerable worker.

He therefore agreed, in principle, that the appellant’s known one‑eyed condition was “a relevant fact to be taken into account”. However, he doubted whether on the facts it was possible to distinguish the duty owed to a one‑eyed from that owed to a two‑eyed worker. Given that loss of an eye is “a most serious injury to any man”, he saw only two coherent alternatives: either the employers had been negligent throughout for failing to provide goggles to all men doing this work, or the risk of eye injury was so remote that no employer could be found negligent for not providing goggles for any of them.

Referring to Lord Dunedin’s test in Morton v. William Dixon Ltd., he found that providing goggles was neither “commonly done by other persons in like circumstances” nor shown to be “so obviously wanted that it would be folly in anyone to neglect to provide it”. Recognising the appellant’s one‑eyed condition as a factor, he nevertheless concluded that the risk was too remote, and that there was no negligence towards either one‑ or two‑eyed men.

Implications

This decision clarifies that an employer’s common law duty of care is owed to each employee individually and that the scope of that duty is affected not only by the probability of harm but also by the likely gravity of the injury in light of the employee’s known characteristics.

The House of Lords rejected the narrow view that only an increased likelihood of an accident can heighten the duty of care. Instead, it held that foreseeable severity of harm, including the catastrophic implications of total blindness for a one‑eyed worker, is a relevant and potentially decisive factor in determining what precautions a reasonable employer must take.

The case illustrates that usual industry practice, while important evidence, is not conclusive where a particular employee’s vulnerability significantly alters the risk profile. Even where general practice supports not taking a precaution for ordinary employees, the law may compel additional precautions for a known vulnerable worker if they are reasonable, simple and proportionate to the gravity of the potential injury.

In practical terms, the case underlines that employers must consider known disabilities or particular susceptibilities of employees when designing systems of work and safety measures. It stands as a leading authority for integrating the seriousness of potential harm into assessments of reasonable care in negligence, especially in workplace safety and employer’s liability contexts.

Verdict: The House of Lords, by a majority, allowed the appeal, reversed the Court of Appeal, and restored Mr Justice Lynskey’s judgment on liability in favour of the appellant, with quantum of damages to be reconsidered by the Court of Appeal and costs awarded to the appellant.

Source: Paris v Stepney BC [1950] UKHL 3