Enforcement

This document only describes enforcement action taken since Jan 2001.

Prosecutions

1 In July 2001, Imperial College was fined a total of £25,000 with £21,800 costs at Blackfriars Crown Court after pleading guilty to two charges. These were breaches of Section 2 of the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974, and Regulation 12 (1) of the Genetically Modified Organisms (Contained Use) Regulations 1992 at St. Mary's campus. Shortcomings included:

no proper means of fumigating the laboratory in the event of an accidental spillage of genetically modified virus;
no autoclave for the inactivation of waste within the laboratory suite;
work that should have been undertaken in a class III safety cabinet was in fact being undertaken in a class I cabinet, which is important because the latter type of safety cabinet provides a lower level of worker protection than the former type;
the local rules covering the procedures to be used in the laboratory were inadequate and some procedures were apparently untested.

Improvement Notices

2 Two centres have received Improvement Notices:

In May 2001 an Improvement Notice was issued to NERC for a breach of Regulation 17 of the Genetically Modified Organisms (Contained Use) Regulations 2000 and points f, l, m of Schedule 7 at the Institute of Virology & Environmental Microbiology, Oxford. Inadequacies in the local code of practice for work at containment level 3 were found. There were no written standard operating procedures for particularly hazardous work procedures at containment level 3. There was no specified disinfection procedure for use in case of spillage at containment level 3.
In August 2001 an Improvement Notice was issued to University College London for a breach of the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 Regulation 5 (1) and The Genetically Modified Organisms (Contained Use) Regulations 2000, Regulation 10 and Regulation 11, at the Gower Street premises. The arrangements for planning, organisation, control, monitoring, and review of genetic modification activities were neither adequate nor effective. As a result there was no clear picture of the genetic modification activities being carried out and some class 2 and class 3 activities had not been notified to the Health and Safety Executive.

Both Notices have been complied with.