Mr Uren was a member of the RAF who suffered a spinal injury when taking part in a ‘health and fun day’, during which he dived head first into an inflatable pool containing water with a depth of 18 inches while competing to collect pieces of plastic fruit.

The Roman philosopher Seneca and those with a fatalist nature will despair when reading the case.

He sued the Ministry of Defence, his employer, and Corporate Leisure (UK) Ltd, the suppliers of the pool who also supervised the event.

Before his accident there had been a first heat of the competition in which others had dived into the pool, captured on film by an MoD photographer who, with due prescience, stated to another spectator that someone would get hurt.

Mr Uren was, therefore, injured doing what others had done before him, which had been observed by both defendants and had not been prevented.

There was evidence that use of the pool for this particular form of activity was a first.

Both defendants argued that it was reasonably safe to enter the pool head first, and to forbid such entry removed much of the enjoyable challenge.

The Court of Appeal unanimously allowed the claimant’s appeal on the basis that the trial judge had erred in holding that the game carried a very small risk of injury when balanced against its social value.

In allowing the appeal their lordships referred the matter to a High Court judge to consider the question of the degree of the risk of serious injury entailed in the game as played, and whether that degree of risk was acceptable in light of the social value of the game.

This was the test outlined in Tomlinson v Congleton Borough Council [2003] UK HL 47.

It is, however, the comments of Smith LJ in respect of the value of risk assessments which have wider relevance.

Her ladyship has been at the forefront of promoting the value of risk assessment, a concept about which many of her fellow judges in the Court of Appeal have in the past seemed ambivalent.

She exposed this failing in her judgment in Alison v London Underground Ltd [2008] EWCA Civ 71, when she stated ‘it seems to me that insufficient judicial attention has been given to risk assessments in the years since the duty to conduct them was introduced’.

While confirming that the failure to risk-assess will never be the direct cause of an injury, it can be indirectly causative, and if proven will result in liability attaching.

She headlined her judgment by stating that risk assessments are ‘an important feature of the health and safety landscape’, before emphasising: ‘I would not wish judges to have the idea that risk assessments are unimportant and can never affect the outcome of a claim.

'I would not wish them to think that all that matters is an objective assessment of safety by the court. Sometimes, the failure to undertake a proper risk assessment can affect or even determine the outcome of the claim and judges must be alive to that and not sweep it aside.’

Importantly, she emphasised that a template model of risk assessment by way of a point attribution system to risks must not provide a false picture, thereby tipping the outcome of the assessment towards compliance with regulation rather than the identification of danger.

In the incident case, the two defendants had not conferred about risk assessment.

Therefore, the MoD, in seeking to shift responsibility to the supplier – justifiable if an employer can show that he had satisfied himself that a contractor had carried out a thorough risk assessment – could not do so when the risk assessment of the pool supplier was neither suitable or sufficient.

A final word on risk assessment goes to Latham LJ in Sherlock v Chester City Council [2004] EWCA Civ 2010, when he stated ‘the purpose of risk assessment… is to ensure that what may appear to be obvious is, in truth, obvious, in the sense that both parties have appreciated the risk’.

The consequence to Mr Uren was catastrophic.

A little thought by either defendant may well have resulted in the risk being identified and then direction given to avoid the activity being performed in the manner in which he did so.

As Seneca said: ‘Enjoy present pleasures in such a way as not to injure future ones.’

Simon Allen is joint head of the national personal injury department at Russell Jones & Walker and managing partner of the Sheffield office