Teresa White & Anor v Hooke Highways Limited & Anor

Facts

Jack Bristow, a 23-year-old trainee Traffic Management Operative, was killed on 18 February 2022 during Storm Eunice while returning to Oxfordshire in a works van driven by his colleague Callum Smith. A tree fell onto the cab on Old Odiham Road, causing a catastrophic head injury from which he died at the scene. Both men were employed by Hooke Highways Limited, the first defendant, and had volunteered the previous day for a job collecting temporary traffic lights, barriers, signs and cones from Old Woking Road for a client, I&G, which had asked for the equipment to be removed by 9.00am. The Met Office had upgraded the Amber warning for Oxfordshire and Hampshire to a Red Weather Warning at 3.44am that morning, covering 10.00am to 3.00pm. The police concluded the incident was a matter of horrific timing, and the Coroner, at an inquest on 4 October 2022, commented that the tree falling onto the cab was not reasonably foreseeable; the Health and Safety Executive declined to investigate further on jurisdictional grounds. Jack's parents, as personal representatives of his estate and on behalf of his dependants, including his infant son Harvey, sued the employer in negligence and also the landowner, the second defendant. Liability as between the claimants and Hooke Highways was tried as a discrete issue over 14 and 15 July 2026.

Decision

Issues

• Whether Jack's death on the journey was reasonably foreseeable by his employer.
• Whether the employer's duty required it to assess or mitigate the risks of the journey, including by carrying out a suitable and sufficient risk assessment.
• Whether any of the precautions contended for — declining the job, substituting a local operative, or instructing the men to remain at the Hampshire depot — was required.

Reasoning

Master Šabić KC accepted that Hooke Highways owed a non-delegable duty to take reasonable care for Jack's safety, the question being the scope of that duty. Applying the test in Whippey v Jones, the court asked whether a reasonable employer would have contemplated that injury was likely to follow, a remote possibility of injury being insufficient; and drew on Baker v Quantum Clothing, in which Smith LJ observed that reasonableness pervades common law liability and that an employer may properly do nothing about a risk that is slight. A Red Weather Warning was advisory only, aimed at the population at large across a wide area, and was directed to flying debris and to road closures and disruption rather than to any prohibition on travel; the risk of death from a falling tree while driving was a remote possibility, not a sufficient probability. The journey used ordinary domestic infrastructure and was in no way inherently perilous, standing in contrast to the Andean helicopter flight considered in Dusek v Stormharbour Securities LLP, from which the court also took the proposition that an unnecessary risk is one guarded against by measures not wholly disproportionate to it and that an employer's control over external dangers is limited. The employer controlled neither the highway nor the tree, and the van was sound. Significantly, no expert or other evidence of industry standard or common practice was before the court, so there was no evidential basis for finding that the employer had fallen short; what evidence there was suggested other organisations had staff on the roads. As to risk assessment, the court accepted that Hooke Highways had a policy and had identified the foreseeable risks, imposing a prohibition on lone working, liaison between depots and check-ins. Testing the matter as Smith LJ did in Uren v Corporate Leisure (UK) Ltd, the absence of an assessment gives rise to liability only where a suitable and sufficient one would probably have produced a precaution that would probably have avoided the injury, and the claimants had not shown what such an assessment would have revealed. Each suggested precaution failed: the Woking job was essential or of significant public importance and could not reasonably have been deferred; the Hampshire depot was at capacity when the job was allocated; and it would have been artificial to compel two men, free to stay and anxious to get home, to remain at the depot. The precautions were articulated with hindsight.

Case history