Two separate fall-from-height incidents a year apart left two workers seriously injured and have resulted in the conviction of a multinational food ingredients supplier.
Cambridge Crown Court heard on 27 November that the first incident occurred on 7 July 2009, at Jas Bowman and Sons’ UK manufacturing base near Hitchin, Hertfordshire.
While attempting to clean flour product from inside an elevated screw conveyor, a maintenance engineer fell more than two metres. The engineer had climbed up the machine and stood on the outer framework to remove the upper guarding on the conveyor when he slipped, hitting the floor below and fracturing his right shoulder blade and a vertebra in his spine.
“The immediate cause of his injuries was a fall from a slippery surface, but the underlying cause was a matter of competence,” Graham Tompkins, the investigating HSE inspector, told SHP. “The issue of how the screw conveyor would be cleaned was raised with management at the design stage, but possible solutions, such as drop bottoms, which can be unbolted from below, were not implemented.”
“The company failed to address specific difficulties with the guard. It had provided training in the use of ladders and power scaffold, but these could not be used with this particular piece of kit, owing to its location and framework,” he explained.
“This was a regular activity, and should have been foreseeable, so proper controls should have been put in place.”
A year later, on 15 July 2010, an electrical sub-contractor plummeted down the shaft of a goods lift while carrying out maintenance work on a jammed second-floor lift door. He fractured his skull and almost completely severed his right ear.
The court heard that although a panel reading indicated the lift was at the second-floor level, it had in fact automatically returned to the ground floor. The worker manually opened the door by overriding a release mechanism and stepped in, falling into the lift shaft. He developed a cranial blood clot and sustained extensive bruising as a result of the fall and has not worked since the incident owing to his injuries.
Mitigating, the company said it had a healthy turnover but there was a pressure on profit because of the low wheat yield and its high cost this year. It explained that in the first case, the worker had been operating outside of his training. The firm said it has since introduced a working platform, which bolts into the bulk packer with edge protection to prevent a fall.
In relation to the most recent case, the company said the lift had been properly maintained under LOLER, but it accepted that the boundary between what should and should not have been done by its own in-house maintenance team had been blurred. It has now introduced an audit system devised by an ex-HSE inspector.
Inspector Tompkins commented: “These were both serious incidents in their own right, but coupled together they provide a worrying picture. Lessons should have been learned from the first incident, but the safety of workers continued to be compromised.
“This culminated with the fall of the electrical sub-contractor, which was entirely preventable and should have been avoided. He could easily have been killed and I hope the severity of that incident and the subsequent prosecution serves as a final wake-up call.”
Jas Bowman and Sons pleaded guilty to breaching reg.6(3) of the Work at Height Regulations 2005 for not taking measures to prevent a fall, and to breaching s2(1) and s3(1) of the HSWA 1974 by not ensuring the safety of employees and other people by properly planning, supervising and carrying out work in a safe manner.
The company, which has a £40m turnover and employs more than 200 staff at two sites, was fined £15,000 on the first count and a combined £25,000 for the two HSWA offences. It was also ordered to pay £20,282 in full costs.
Judge Gareth Hawkesworth said there had been “a careless inability to focus on the issues”. The breaches continued over a substantial period of time and “when it came to issues of maintenance, the company fell far below the standard one would expect”.
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