A self-employed maintenance contractor has admitted safety failings after a friend, who was helping him on a job, fell through a roof at a disused factory.
Ashley Jones was hired to dismantle the roof of a disused rubber factory at Bullo Pill, Newnham in the Forest of Dean, on 4 September last year.
He asked one of his friends to assist him with the job. The man, who wishes to remain anonymous, climbed a ladder to access the roof and wasn’t warned it was fragile.
There were no witnesses to the incident, and it’s thought the man was walking across the roof, which was made of fragile asbestos cement, when it gave way. He fell three metres to the ground and suffered a broken elbow. He was unable to work for three months owing to his injury.
The HSE investigated the incident and found Jones had failed to plan the work properly. The work should have been carried out from underneath the roof from either a cherry-picker or a scaffold tower. There were also no guardrails in place to prevent falls.
HSE inspector Sue Adsett said: “Ashley Jones is a general property maintenance worker and had neither the training nor experience working on industrial roofs.
“Falls from height are the single biggest cause of deaths and serious injury in the construction industry but proper planning and simple precautions, such as working from platforms below when possible and using edge protection, can reduce the risks.”
Jones appeared at Cheltenham Magistrates’ Court on 18 March and pleaded guilty to breaching reg.6(3) of the Work at Height Regulations 2005. He was fined £1250 and ordered to pay £1000 in costs.
Conceding he accepted he didn’t have the required knowledge and experience to do the work, he said he usually worked on domestic properties but needed the extra work. He stressed there was no deliberate attempt to cut corners on safety and the failings were an oversight. He added that he fully cooperated with the investigation and has no previous convictions.
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Amazing how the commercial client gets away scot free again?
And yet another example of WAH Guidance being totally ignored by those it is aimed at.
There has to be a better way to encourage competence and due dilligence for such work,. repeated examples are highlighted herein, and continually astound me in the abject failure repeated time and again.
Another injury that could have been a fatality to add to the WAH incident stats. He is extremely lucky, and so is the chap that fell.
I know the feeling, years back a demo op through a hand axe at me when I asked him to clip on?
Obviously he was having a bad day, it got much worse after I got hold of his boss.
The repeated failure of prosecution of client`s when ops fall from roofs or through fragile roof etc difies belief given that they are the controlling influence on who is appointed, you have to question the investigation process? CDM was supposed to reduce these situations. It fails too and so does WAH Guidance?
Bob,
i agree there has to be a better way to encourage competence; due diligence and achieve compliance. i am amazed at how many work at height issues that i note on a day to day basis during site safety audits. I was also on a site where an operative who was wearing a harness in a cherry picker but was not attached fell to his death and could not understand why someone would risk their own life.
Agree Bob, you can prosecute as many little contractors as you like, prosecute one client for CDM breach and they will pretty quickly find out about their duties i.e. “allow adequate time and resources” and “check the competence and resources of all appointees” etc etc. Thought that was the whole point of CDM??
Current climate, people will always be tempted to take on work above and beyond the capacity or capability and beating up these guys does little to raise the game for our industry.
The thing that ocurrs to me with this type of case is: A self employed jobber has nobody to nudge him into ensuring he does a job safely. Its easy to say that he should have known better, but what are the systems to help him ‘know better’? I have dealt with many one man band contractors and some are willing to up their game, others just refuse – and they no longer do any work for us. The client should choose a competent contractor and monitor the work contractors do on their behalf……