Legal minds ponder matters of liability
March 2019. For an item that I wrote for the newsletter of the Football Safety Officers' Association, I asked specialist football solicitor Lochlinn Parker for a view on comments in the new Green Guide on clubs needing to consider installing "barriers or seats incorporating barriers, designed to mitigate risks arising from persistent standing". Lochlinn's view was:
“A club must take all reasonable steps to keep their fans safe, including in areas of persistent standing. In light of the new Green Guide guidance, a club may be held liable for a breach of its duty of care if it failed to consider the now permitted implementation of additional safety measures, such as the use of rail seats, as a way to resolve the issue.”
This view attracted a number of interesting comments on Twitter from legal and crowd safety academics, among them Clifford Stott (an Associate Dean of Keele University who regularly works with police forces and football authorities on crowd management), Marcus Keppel-Palmer (Associate Head of Law at UWE) and Dr Geoff Pearson (Lecturer of Law at Manchester University):