Negligence

There was no imposition or assumption of responsibility by reason only that a company was the parent company of another company. The question was whether what the parent company had done amounted to taking on a direct duty to the subsidiary’s employees. In appropriate circumstances, the law might impose on a parent company responsibility for the health and safety of its subsidiary’s employees.

Those circumstances included a situation where: (i) the business of the parent and subsidiary were in a relevant respect the same; (ii) the parent had, or ought to have had, superior knowledge on some relevant aspect of health and safety in the particular industry; (iii) the subsidiary’s system of work was unsafe as the parent company knew, or ought to have known; and (iv) the parent had known or ought to have foreseen that the subsidiary or its employees would rely on its using that superior knowledge for the employee’s protection. For the purposes of the final issue, it was not