Northern Ireland Justice Minister Naomi Long MLA will consider a legislation to make assualt on retail workers a specific stand-alone offence, aiming to introduce “further protection for those workers in public facing roles”.
It comes after Neil Johnston, director of the Northern Ireland Retail Consortium (NIRC) and Paddy Lillis, the general secretary of Usdaw, met with Long and her officials last week discuss how best to protect retail workers from assualt.
The meeting follows a joint campaign by NIRC and Usdaw who were concerned that retail staff in Northern Ireland would not be as well protected under the law as their counterparts in Great Britain.
The Protection of Workers Act came into force in Scotland in August 2021 and the Westminster government has promised to legislate to make assaults on retail workers a specific stand-alone offence in England and Wales.
Following an exchange of correspondence between NIRC, Usdaw and the Minister, Ms Long has agreed to go further than her initial suggestion, “which would simply have allowed the introduction of a statutory aggravating factor at the point of sentencing,” said the NIRC.
Part of the conversation focused on improved categorisation and recording could help determine the status of workers involved in incidents of violence.
The NIRC explained that if future legislation includes an offence for assaulting a public facing worker, then it would be possible to identify whether the assault involved retail workers as opposed to other categories of workers, such as ambulance staff, public sector workers and civil servants.
No comments yet