£6 million fine for ‘rigid and blinkered’ local authority

Pascal Bates has prosecuted Cambridgeshire County Council for failures over the course of 11 years as to the safety of pedestrians and cyclists trying to cross the Cambridgeshire Guided Busway or moving alongside it. The charges covered from the 2011 opening of the Busway until 2023. Despite a catalogue of accidents involving death or injury, the county council failed to assess risk at all for five years – something the Judge described as ‘particularly shocking’ – and inadequate and piecemeal ones thereafter. The offending continued despite deaths in 2015, 2018 and 2021 and another incident of life-changing injury to a 16-year-old in 2021. The Court held that there had been a ‘rigid and blinkered’ approach of assuming measures taken prior to opening, in some instances prior to construction, were and would continue to be sufficient to ensure safe operation of the Busway in practice and as conditions developed over the years. In order to identify approach and show it inadequate, Pascal Bates had to deploy documentation going all the way back to 2004.

Aside from holding the defendant county council to responsibility high culpability offending and the highest level of harm risked, there were two areas on which the parties differed and which the Court needed to resolve. The first was how to reflect the multiple deaths and injuries on separate occasions. That included a dispute as to whether the 2021 death has been caused by the county council’s offending. Pascal Bates successfully established that that death was more than minimally caused by the defendant’s offending, and thus fell to be taken appropriately into account, notwithstanding it having to be assumed (in the absence of clear proof otherwise to the criminal standard) that the deceased was struck by a bus as a result of her own volition (whilst the balance of her mind was disturbed), not through pure accident.

The second area requiring resolution was how, under the sentencing guidelines, to fine a very large organisation which was also the local authority for a wide geography owing significant public obligations.

The penalties imposed – fines totalling £6 million, plus costs, are amongst the largest, if not the largest, ever imposed on a local authority for safety failings.

Please see below for news articles:

ITV: https://www.itv.com/news/anglia/2025-04-16/fine-of-6m-for-council-over-three-deaths-on-guided-busway

BBC: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c981jy31ez0o