Three separate hand-injury incidents in just over a year have cost a disposable paper-products manufacturer £85,000 in fines.
Lincoln Crown Court handed down the sentence to Staples Disposables on 19 April after the judge said the firm’s culture had been “production-led”, and that it had “run risks for rushed production”.
The court heard that all three incidents took place at the firm’s factory in Fulbeck Heath, near Grantham, Lincolnshire. On 26 July 2011, Bruno Jorge, 32, of Sleaford, required his left thumb to be amputated after his hand was drawn into, and crushed in, the rollers of an unguarded machine, while trying to clear a blockage. He also fractured his palm and was off work for several months.
On inspection, the HSE found that the interlocked guards had been overridden to enable engineers to access the machine during commissioning. Although Staples Disposables’ management knew about the missing guards, they failed to take any action to reinstate them.
A month later, on 25 August, Lincoln agency worker Yelena Semenchenko, 30, cut her finger on the blade of a napkin-folding machine (see picture), on which the electrically-interlocked guard had been removed. The company had installed the guard on the machine after a similar incident on the same device in 2007 — for which it was prosecuted by the HSE in 2008 — but had since removed it.
In the third incident, on 14 August last year, Simon Burnett, 46, of Navenby, lost all four fingers of his right hand after it was caught between unguarded rollers. He is still off work and it is not known if he will be able to return.
Staples Disposables pleaded guilty to three charges of breaching s2(1) of the HSWA 1974 for failing to ensure its employees’ safety and one s3(1) breach of the same Act for failing to ensure the safety of non-employees.
The company was fined £25,000 for the s2(1) breach in the case of Bruno Jorge. It was fined the same amount for breaching s3(1) in the case of Yelena Semenchenko, with no additional penalty invoked for the s2(1) charge. It was also fined £35,000 for breaching s2(1) in the case of Simon Burnett, and ordered to pay full costs of £31,380.
HSE inspector David Lefever, who investigated all three cases, told SHP that a culture had been allowed to develop where factory operatives were undertaking tasks on a daily basis in an unsafe manner. There were no systems in place to supervise or monitor what people were doing.
Staples Disposables said in mitigation that it recognised safety-culture issues existed and that there had been a lack of supervision, but it had imported the culture from the previous owner of the company. The firm said in all three cases senior management had not been aware of what was going on, although the inspector questioned that in relation to the first incident.
He added that the company had a poor safety management system and had failed to supervise and monitor operations in the factory. “The only supervisors were shift supervisors, whose primary function was to monitor output, not to monitor individuals operating machinery,” he explained.
The judge said senior management should have been aware of the culture at the company, and rebuked it for its poor safety record. The HSE had previously served Improvement Notices on the company, which had experienced accidents before. He added there had been a “profit motive” at the company.
Since the prosecution, the company’s insurer has sent in a team of health and safety specialists, who have worked on all of its machinery and systems. It has also employed a new health and safety manager to bolster the team expertise, and the company is currently running a project to improve its safety culture.
Inspector Lefever concluded: “Staples Disposables was well aware that machines should have interlocked guards in place to prevent people accessing dangerous moving parts of the machinery, yet it continued to put workers at risk over a prolonged period. Injury was inevitable.”
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