Section 37 Could Jail You for Something You Didn’t Do — Most Senior Managers Have Never Heard of It
Most senior managers assume the person who makes the mistake carries the risk. Wrong. Under Section 37 of the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974, the person prosecuted is often the one who never touched the job — the director, the GM, three levels removed from the shift floor. Consent, connivance, or neglect. That’s the test. Neglect is the one that catches people out, because it doesn’t require you to know anything went wrong. It only asks whether you should have known, and whether you did enough to find out.
This is where leisure centre health and safety compliance stops being a paperwork exercise and turns personal. If your honest answer to “how do I know?” is “I trust my team” — that’s not a defence. That’s the case against you.
How Section 37 of the Health and Safety at Work Act Convicts You
For Section 37 to apply, three things have to line up. Your organisation has to be found guilty of a health and safety offence first — the corporate body, not you personally. Then the prosecution has to show the offence happened with your consent, your connivance, or through your neglect. And you have to hold a position — director, manager, secretary, or someone acting like one — that gave you real influence over what happened.
Get convicted and you’re looking at up to two years in prison, on top of disqualification as a director under the Company Directors Disqualification Act 1986. Ignorance isn’t a defence. The law was written precisely so “I didn’t know” stops being good enough once you’re the person who was supposed to know.
Why “I Trust My Team” Won’t Save You
In January 2023, a disabled swimmer went under the water during a session at the Galleon Leisure Centre in Kilmarnock and stayed submerged for close to two minutes before anyone spotted him. He survived. It took until June 2025 for the prosecution to conclude — and when it did, it wasn’t just the leisure centre in the dock. Five trustees of the Kilmarnock Leisure Centre Trust, all serving councillors, were prosecuted alongside the Trust itself after admitting failures in how risk assessments were carried out day to day.
None of them were on poolside that day. East Ayrshire Council’s own statement on the case is direct about why: the trustees “provided strategic oversight of the Leisure Centre business and left the day to day operational control of the premises to the Trust managers and staff.” That’s a polite way of saying they trusted their team. It didn’t save them — a Sheriff at Kilmarnock Sheriff Court fined the Trust and its trustees £11,825, paid from the Trust’s own reserves.
That’s the same principle Section 37 exists to enforce for companies: strategic oversight isn’t a shield. In the right circumstances, it’s the evidence.
Leisure Centre Health and Safety Compliance: What “Enough” Actually Looks Like
Getting leisure centre health and safety compliance to “enough” isn’t a feeling. It’s evidence, and it comes down to four things:
- Risk assessments reviewed on a real schedule — not filed and forgotten until the next accreditation visit.
- Every action from those risk assessments tracked through to completion, not left as a good intention.
- Staff trained on the procedures that matter to their role, with a record of exactly who’s read what.
- A way to pull all of that together in minutes, not days, when someone official comes asking.
That last one is where most operators fall down. Not because the work isn’t happening — because proving it happened is scattered across spreadsheets, paper files, and somebody’s memory of “we definitely did that in March.”
Where OpsPal Fits
Section 37 of the Health and Safety at Work Act doesn’t care whether you own good software. It only cares whether you can prove what happened. This is the exact gap OpsPal was built to close. Risk assessments live on a dashboard that turns amber 30 days before review and red the day it’s overdue — not buried in a folder nobody’s opened since the last Quest visit. Further actions sit at the bottom of each risk assessment with their own due dates, and a site-wide view rolls every outstanding action into one place, so nothing gets missed because it was on page four of a document somebody printed once and forgot.
Digital procedures track staff acknowledgement — who’s read the fire evacuation procedure, who hasn’t, and when it last changed — with a before/after view so you can see exactly what’s different without re-reading the whole document.
BH Live run 17 facilities on this model, with compliance visibility across every site from one login — see their case study for how that looks in practice. When an assessor, an insurer, or an investigator asks you to prove it, the answer isn’t a filing cabinet. It’s a dashboard.
Real health and safety management isn’t about ticking a box. It’s about answering “how do you know?” without a pause.
Monday Morning Action
Ask yourself the question an investigator would ask — not “did we do the risk assessment,” but “could I prove it, right now, for any site, any date, in under five minutes.” If the honest answer is no, that’s not a compliance gap sitting quietly in the background. That’s the case being built against you, one missed check at a time.
Book a demo and see how it works.
Sources
- Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974, Section 37 | legislation.gov.uk | accessed 28 July 2026 | https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1974/37/section/37
- Leading Health and Safety at Work: Leadership Actions for Directors and Board Members (INDG417) | Health and Safety Executive | published 2013, page last updated 2025 | https://www.hse.gov.uk/pubns/indg417.htm
- Company Directors Disqualification Act 1986 | legislation.gov.uk
- Statement from East Ayrshire Council regarding Kilmarnock Leisure Centre Trust health and safety prosecution | East Ayrshire Council | 13 June 2025 | https://newsroom.east-ayrshire.gov.uk/news/statement-from-east-ayrshire-council-regarding-kilmarnock-leisure-centre-trust-health-and-safety-prosecution
- East Ayrshire councillors admit safety failings over Galleon incident | Ayrshire Today | accessed 28 July 2026 | https://www.ayrshire-today.co.uk/news/25232541.east-ayrshire-councillors-admit-safety-failings-galleon-incident/
⚠️ Flagged for Craig’s review before publishing — two things specifically:
- Legal/regulatory claims (Section 37 conditions, 2-year maximum sentence, director disqualification) per your standard review gate.
- The Kilmarnock/Galleon case study names a real organisation, real named councillors, and involves a vulnerable person nearly drowning. It’s sourced to East Ayrshire Council’s own public statement, but the piece frames it as illustrating “the same principle” as Section 37 rather than claiming it was prosecuted under Section 37 — I couldn’t confirm the exact statutory route (the Trust appears unincorporated, so trustees may have been liable directly as duty-holders rather than via Section 37’s secondary liability, which technically requires an offence by a body corporate). Worth your own check before this goes live, given it names real people and a real incident.
