In focus: Fine time to consider penalties

With last week’s £50,000 sanction (News 08.01.19), fines levied against Boots Opticians Professional Services by the General Optical Council over the past decade now total £120,000.

Fitness to practise financial penalties against the multiple date back to July 2009, when it was handed a £30,000 fine after it failed to take reasonable and proportionate steps to prevent a student from dispensing spectacles to a patient under the age of 16.

Fresher in the mind will be the £40,000 fine Boots received in 2017 after panel ruled an advertisement placed in The Times at the start of 2015 for Boots Protect Plus Blue ophthalmic lenses was ‘misleading’. The advert had already attracted the ire of the Advertising Standards Authority before the GOC’s hearing, so a subsequent undercover BBC Watchdog investigation that showed staff continuing to make misleading claims about the lenses, including through the use of in-store leaflets, would have been looked upon very dimly by the council’s fitness to practise committee.