Factories: Approval, Licensing and the Occupier

In one line

A factory needs the site, the plans and the licence approved under rules, and if the State says nothing for thirty days the site permission is deemed granted; where premises are let to several factories the owner and the occupiers are jointly and severally liable for the common facilities; and the appropriate Government may declare any place where a manufacturing process is carried on to be a factory whatever its size.

In exam wording: section 79 of the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code 2020 empowers the appropriate Government to make rules for the submission of plans, previous permission for the site and the construction or extension of a factory and for licensing and renewal, provides that permission is deemed granted where no order is communicated within a period not exceeding thirty days, and gives an appeal within thirty days against a refusal; section 80 makes the owner of premises and the occupiers of factories using common facilities jointly and severally responsible for those facilities; and section 81 empowers the appropriate Government to declare that all or any of the provisions of the Part apply to any place where a manufacturing process is carried on irrespective of the number of workers, whereupon the place is deemed a factory, the owner the occupier and any person working there a worker.

Why the law has this at all

A factory is dangerous before anybody works in it. Where it is sited decides who breathes its air; how it is laid out decides whether a man can get out of it when it burns; what is installed in it decides what can explode.

The Factories Act 1948, which section 143(1)(a) repeals, therefore began with approval, licensing and notice, and this Code keeps the same three steps in section 79. The point of all three is that the State should see the factory on paper before it exists, because after it exists the cost of changing it is the reason nothing is changed.

Section 79 makes one change to that scheme worth stating at once, and it is characteristic of this Code. The old Act required the previous permission of the State Government or the Chief Inspector. Section 79(2) adds a deeming: apply electronically with the plans and specifications, and if no order is communicated within a period not exceeding thirty days, the permission is deemed to have been granted. The delay of the office no longer stops the factory. Whether that is a reform or a risk depends on what one thinks the inspecting office was doing with those thirty days.

Section 80 answers a problem the old law handled badly, the industrial estate: one building, several small factories, one staircase, one water tank and one fire system, and nobody responsible for any of them.