Hong Kong’s Labour Department is moving to drastically increase penalties from HKD200,000 to HKD6 million, or 10 per cent of the offending company’s turnover, whichever is higher, in a bid to deter construction safety violations.
Revised to be more in line with international standards, the new fines would apply to “extremely serious cases” involving high culpability or serious negligence, the department said in a document tabled to the Legislative Council’s panel on manpower on 13 March, as reported by the South China Morning Post.
For other more general offences, the department proposed penalties of up to HKD3 million. Maximum prison terms would rise from six months to two years.
In 2017, there were 11,077 industrial accidents in 2017, resulting in the deaths of 29 people.
The average fine for occupational safety offences in 2018 was only about HKD10,500, while that for the construction industry was HKD10,000, the department said. For fatal industrial accidents on building sites, the average fine was only about HKD27,000.
In contrast, the maximum fine in Australia was about HKD22 million, while there are no maximum fine limits in Britain.
“There are views in the community that one of the major reasons is that the sentences for [occupational safety and health] offences are on the low side, which fails to reflect the seriousness of the contraventions and fails to pose a sufficient deterrent effect to duty holders violating the law,” said the Labour Department.
Even though imprisonment was included as a potential penalty in the industrial safety laws in 1989, so far, there had only been three cases of suspended sentences. — Construction+ Online
