Audi apprentice in Reading - comments from coroner - what are your thoughts?

I think its quite a risk to substitute ones own feelings for those of a Coroner who has heard all the details and is acting within the guidelines of the law...in the words of the report

"Mr Cheese's family asked for neglect from Audi to form part of the coroner's conclusion but Mr Bedford said the legal requirement for this had not been met."

Clearly this was a very troubled young man who had many things going on in his life - equally the paper could have majored on another ex serviceman taking their own life

It is a minor point but this young man worked for the Sytner Group and not Audi.
There are plenty of organisation which unofficially condone 'horse play' and 'banter' right up to the moment things go wrong when they are shocked to find out such things happen and seek to improve their policies.
I do however, fully agree with Keith, we are not in full possession of the facts of this case and so whilst the obvious anguish of the parents is understandable, it does not mean the coroner made a mistake.

In my (extensive) experience, motor trade fitters and their managers / proprietors are on the very far to extreme end of the spectrum when it comes to failure to adopt anything like 21st century employment practices - equality of opportunity etc. usually being an alien concept there.

So, bullying / harassment / beasting / brutal and degrading 'initiation ceremonies' / etc are I'm sure still commonplace within many garages: big ones with an established cadre of apprentices are probably far worse than Fred and just one apprentice in his shed.

Things are changing, but those presently in command will need to be replaced by the next generation before significant progress can be made.

(Similar applies to the whole of what's left of the engineering sector, but garages tend to be particularly bad)

ps

once upon a time, I was charged with encouraging local garages to take on at least some female apprentices - not exactly 'mssion impossible' but something of a challenge!

Many thanks Steven, just to clarify: I do not believe the coroner made a mistake. I simply struggle with the fact that the organisation - on the face of it - appears to have badly let down a young man but there does not appear to be any sign to indicates their acknowledgment. Indeed, corrective action may have taken place and those facts may not have been included in the reporting so the 'silence' appears to be rather misleading.

Hi Clare Marie,

It may be worth thinking about the broader legal position here. The Coroner had a fairly narrow remit as part of this - that is, to determine the cause(s) of a sudden / unexpected death. This the Coroner did, as reported. (Incidentally, Steven, I think it was a far from minor matter that the BBC of all organisations, didn't get their facts right in implying that the employer was Audi UK: in fact the car firm Audi had nothing to do with all this, except to sell etc their products to a franchised dealer, which * totally independently of Audi * owned the garage and employed all the staff there and undertook the usual legal liabilities of any employer. Such franchised dealerships are standard practice throughout the UK motor trade, but the BBC reporters and editors seemed to have been ignorant of this basic fact and as a result IMHO rather negligently and wrongly brought the name and reputation of Audi into disrepute.

Anyhow, this young person, despite tragically having taken his own life, still has, via his estate / executors, potential claims against his actual employers such as in tort for personal injury and possibly under other employment-related statute such as under the 2010 Equality Act. These would be civil law claims, so be quite different from and involve very different scopes and burdens of proof to Coroners Court or Police criminal actions.

But of course they're linked: for example, if a Coroner finds that a death was directly associated with someone's employer not maintaining a safe working environment, that finding becomes very powerful evidence indeed as regards potential civil claims, which is probably why the family's legal representatives sought this in the Coroners Court.

You rightly express horror etc Clare Marie at the types and levels of workplace 'horseplay' described to the inquest, but, as tried to observe in my previous post, such kind off antics are still almost normal in many shop floor / industrial / engineering workplaces. Of course it's the duty of the employer to comply with the law and to operate a safe place of work, but what goes on amongst apprentices on a shop floor or squaddies in a barrack room or fish filleters on a fish dock is inevitably going to be very different indeed to working life in such as a bank or solicitors office and the term 'reasonably practicable' starts to become most relevant.

As I also tried to say before, such things have no place in today's society and are thankfully much less common for all kinds of reasons, but won't change overnight and in some significant ways will only completely change by process of evolution.

Hi Clare Marie,

It may be worth thinking about the broader legal position here. The Coroner had a fairly narrow remit as part of this - that is, to determine the cause(s) of a sudden / unexpected death. This the Coroner did, as reported. (Incidentally, Steven, I think it was a far from minor matter that the BBC of all organisations, didn't get their facts right in implying that the employer was Audi UK: in fact the car firm Audi had nothing to do with all this, except to sell etc their products to a franchised dealer, which * totally independently of Audi * owned the garage and employed all the staff there and undertook the usual legal liabilities of any employer. Such franchised dealerships are standard practice throughout the UK motor trade, but the BBC reporters and editors seemed to have been ignorant of this basic fact and as a result IMHO rather negligently and wrongly brought the name and reputation of Audi into disrepute.

Anyhow, this young person, despite tragically having taken his own life, still has, via his estate / executors, potential claims against his actual employers such as in tort for personal injury and possibly under other employment-related statute such as under the 2010 Equality Act. These would be civil law claims, so be quite different from and involve very different scopes and burdens of proof to Coroners Court or Police criminal actions.

But of course they're linked: for example, if a Coroner finds that a death was directly associated with someone's employer not maintaining a safe working environment, that finding becomes very powerful evidence indeed as regards potential civil claims, which is probably why the family's legal representatives sought this in the Coroners Court.

You rightly express horror etc Clare Marie at the types and levels of workplace 'horseplay' described to the inquest, but, as tried to observe in my previous post, such kind off antics are still almost normal in many shop floor / industrial / engineering workplaces. Of course it's the duty of the employer to comply with the law and to operate a safe place of work, but what goes on amongst apprentices on a shop floor or squaddies in a barrack room or fish filleters on a fish dock is inevitably going to be very different indeed to working life in such as a bank or solicitors office and the term 'reasonably practicable' starts to become most relevant.

As I also tried to say before, such things have no place in today's society and are thankfully much less common for all kinds of reasons, but won't change overnight and in some significant ways will only completely change by process of evolution.

Thanks David - a good balanced summary