Tenant smashed glass sliding door

So our tenants accidentally smash the vintage glass in a sliding door. There is also a fixed glass "wall" made of the same glass, roughly same size. Glass was made in the 60s, cost to replace is ~$800 for one pane. new glass would be safety glass. The Tennants have children. Would you replace the other pane of nonsafety glass and who should pay.

For the record, we are going to replace the other pane of glass and absorb cost as we would hate for an injury to occur to anyone due to the glass. Tenant to pay for the one they damaged.

 

No! Are you insane? Put safety glass in there. Claim on your insurance.

 

Claim on your insurance.

It is probably illegal to install anything other than safety glass.
Marg

 

Yeap.

 

As per Y-man clarification, what would you do with the other unbroken pane of glass. Would you replace that and who should pay?

 

There was a court-case where both the managing agent and the landlord were found to be at fault when a tenant injured themselves on non-safety glass that was in a front door (as I recall).

I found this on google: Injury In A Rental Property - Landlord Negligence And Compensation

 

Cheers for the link. Good to know. To be honest you'd have to be a right ******* not to replace something you thought might be dangerous

 

Another interesting case here: Jones v Bartlett [2000] HCA 56; 205 CLR 166; 176 ALR 137; 75 ALJR 1 (16 November 2000)

 

You can hardly ask the tenant to pay for the replacement of an unbroken glass panel.

Your responsibility. And if you choose not to, and someone is injured by it, don’t count on your insurance to cover you. It is a hazard, you know about it, so the responsible actions is to replace the glass.

And just be thankful no-one was injured by the broken panel. You could be facing a hefty lawsuit.
Marg

 

To be fair, what we are suggesting here is that every Landlord in Australia would be mad not to go around their entire house replacing all the old glass with modern safety glass. You could use that example as a parallel to hundreds of other situations- such as the tens of thousands of railings that are not compliant to current standards (and not required to be until they're modified).

I'm not saying it's a bad idea to make the house safer, but where does it end?

 

If something is legal, I suspect that insurance can’t refuse to cover it.

In Victoria anyway, it is completely legal to leave existing non-safety glass as is.