Look up the penalty for a health and safety offence on legislation.gov.uk today and you will read £20,000. That figure has not been the maximum since 12 March 2015. The page is not out of date in the ordinary sense — it is showing you the enacted text, correctly, and the enacted text is no longer the law.
Fines printed in HSWA Schedule 3A have not been the maximum since 12 March 2015.
This catches out solicitors, letting agents and every compliance vendor in the sector. It is worth understanding properly, because it is the single most reliable way to be confidently wrong about a penalty.
What section 85 did
Section 85 of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 provides:
"Where, on the commencement day, a relevant offence would, apart from this subsection, be punishable on summary conviction by a fine or maximum fine of £5,000 or more (however expressed), the offence is punishable on summary conviction on or after that day by a fine of any amount."
Commencement day was 12 March 2015. Extent: England and Wales.
Read that carefully. It does not amend any other Act. It does not go through the statute book striking out numbers. It operates generally and invisibly: any summary maximum of £5,000 or more simply stops being a maximum, wherever it appears, without the words changing.
So the printed text stays exactly as it was. And the printed text is what everybody reads.
It is not retrospective. The unlimited fine applies to offences committed on or after 12 March 2015. An offence committed before that date keeps the maximum that applied at the time — so for genuinely historic matters the printed figure is the right one.
Worked example 1: the Health and Safety at Work Act
Gas safety is the one landlords meet. A breach of regulation 36 of the Gas Safety (Installation and Use) Regulations 1998 — no valid CP12 — is an offence under section 33 of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974.
Section 33 sends you to Schedule 3A for the penalty. Schedule 3A, on legislation.gov.uk, today, reads:
Summary conviction: "Imprisonment for a term not exceeding 12 months or a fine not exceeding £20,000, or both."
£20,000 is more than £5,000. LASPO s.85 therefore converted it on 12 March 2015. The fine is unlimited, and has been for eleven years — but you will not learn that from the schedule, because the schedule still says £20,000 and always will.
A landlord budgeting £20,000 as a worst case for a lapsed gas certificate has taken the number from the official source and got it wrong.
Worked example 2: a stale figure in the wild
We found the same error in our own data. Swansea Council's licensing detail, which we had recorded from a first-party source, stated that failing to license an HMO carries "a fine of up to £20,000".
That is the Housing Act 2004 section 72 offence. Same arithmetic: £20,000 is above the £5,000 threshold, so s.85 converted it in 2015. We corrected it to an unlimited fine, cited the conversion in the record, and swept every council detail field and every note in the database. Swansea was the only row still carrying it — this time.
The point is not that one council page was wrong. It is that the figure came from a plausible source, survived several rounds of checking, and would have survived indefinitely if nobody had asked why a 2015 change was not visible in a 2026 document.
What is the maximum fine for no gas safety certificate?
Unlimited. A breach of regulation 36 of the Gas Safety (Installation and Use) Regulations 1998 is an offence under section 33 of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974, and the summary maximum was converted by LASPO s.85 in 2015. Up to 12 months' imprisonment is also available on summary conviction, and up to two years on indictment. Schedule 3A still prints £20,000; that has not been the ceiling for eleven years.
Is a level 5 fine still £5,000?
No — level 5 has been unlimited since 12 March 2015. Levels 1 to 4 on the standard scale are unchanged. This is the single most common stale figure in landlord guidance, because "level 5 (£5,000)" appears in a great deal of material written before 2015 and reads as authoritative.
What does "the statutory maximum" mean now?
For summary offences it usually means nothing, because there is no longer a maximum. The phrase was shorthand for the £5,000 prescribed sum. Where a provision still uses it, or names a figure of £5,000 or more, s.85 has removed the ceiling for offences committed on or after 12 March 2015. Where a provision names a figure below £5,000, the phrase still bites.
Which fines are still capped?
Civil penalties, and summary maxima below £5,000. Section 85 applies to fines imposed by a court on conviction. A civil penalty imposed by a local authority has a real statutory ceiling that s.85 never touched — £30,000 under Housing Act 2004 s.249A, £30,000 for electrical safety, £5,000 for alarms, and £7,000 rising to £40,000 under the Renters' Rights Act 2025.
The standard scale
Fines for summary offences are set by reference to levels on the standard scale, in section 37 of the Criminal Justice Act 1982:
- Level 1 — £200
- Level 2 — £500
- Level 3 — £1,000
- Level 4 — £2,500
- Level 5 — unlimited since 12 March 2015 (previously £5,000)
So "level 5 on the standard scale" in any pre-2015 material means unlimited today, for offences committed on or after that date.
What the statute prints, and the position today
| Offence | What the statute prints | The position today | Instrument |
|---|---|---|---|
| No valid Gas Safety certificate (CP12) | £20,000 | Unlimited | Gas Safety (Installation and Use) Regulations 1998 reg 36; offence under Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 s.33 and Sch 3A, summary maximum converted to unlimited by LASPO 2012 s.85 |
| Non-compliant furniture | £5,000 | Unlimited | Furniture and Furnishings (Fire) (Safety) Regulations 1988; summary maximum converted to unlimited by LASPO 2012 s.85 |
| No legionella risk assessment | £5,000 | Unlimited | Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 s.3; summary maximum converted to unlimited by LASPO 2012 s.85 |
| No HMO fire risk assessment | £5,000 | Unlimited | Management of Houses in Multiple Occupation (England) Regulations 2006; offence under Housing Act 2004 s.234(3), summary maximum converted to unlimited by LASPO 2012 s.85 |
And the ceilings that are real, because they are civil penalties rather than fines:
| Breach | Printed | Ceiling today | Instrument |
|---|---|---|---|
| No valid electrical report (EICR) | £30,000 | £30,000 | Electrical Safety Standards in the Private Rented Sector (England) Regulations 2020, reg 11 |
| Missing smoke alarms | £5,000 | £5,000 | Smoke and Carbon Monoxide Alarm (England) Regulations 2015, as amended 2022 |
| Letting below the minimum EPC rating | £5,000 | £5,000 | Energy Efficiency (Private Rented Property) (England and Wales) Regulations 2015, reg 40 |
| Unlicensed HMO | £30,000 | £30,000 | Housing Act 2004 s.72 offence; civil penalty under s.249A |
| Information Sheet not served | £7,000 | £7,000 / £40,000 repeat | Renters' Rights Act 2025 |
Every figure in both tables is read from the same table that drives our fine calculator, so the article and the tool cannot disagree.
How to tell whether a printed maximum still applies
- Is it a summary conviction maximum? On indictment, s.85 is irrelevant — those fines were already unlimited.
- Is it £5,000 or more? If yes, and the offence existed before 12 March 2015, assume it is now unlimited.
- Is it below £5,000? Then it survives. A level 1 to level 4 fine on the standard scale is unaffected — s.85 only caught level 5 and above.
- Is it a CIVIL penalty rather than a fine? Then s.85 does not touch it at all. This is the distinction that matters most.
The distinction that saves you: civil penalty versus fine
Two completely different things, routinely confused, and only one was affected.
A civil penalty is imposed by the local authority as an alternative to prosecution. It has a real statutory ceiling that s.85 never touched:
- £30,000 for licensing offences, under Housing Act 2004 section 249A.
- £30,000 for electrical safety, under the 2020 Regulations.
- £5,000 for smoke and CO alarms, under the 2015 Regulations as amended in 2022.
- £7,000, rising to £40,000 for a repeat, under the Renters' Rights Act 2025.
A fine is imposed by a court on conviction. Where the offence predates 2015 and carried a summary maximum of £5,000 or more, it is now unlimited.
So "unlicensed HMO" has both: a £30,000 civil penalty the council can impose, or prosecution with an unlimited fine. Those are alternatives, not a total.
Why nobody has fixed this
Because there is nothing to fix. legislation.gov.uk is publishing the enacted text accurately; the change lives in a different Act and operates by conversion. Any tool that scrapes penalty figures from the statute will reproduce the old maxima faithfully and confidently, and a language model trained on those pages will do the same.
It is a good illustration of why we read instruments rather than summaries — and why we record which instrument a figure came from. See the £30,000 civil penalty for how the civil route actually works in practice.
See your own exposure with the corrected figures. Our fine calculator carries the instrument beside every number, and never sums an unlimited fine into a total — because there is no number to add.
Information tool, not legal advice. England and Wales; LASPO s.85 extends to both.