A commercial vehicle body building company in Warrington was fined £20,000 and ordered to pay £3,340 in costs following an accident where an apprentice fell through a skylight while clearing the gutters. The 25-year-old suffered three broken ribs and a ruptured spleen.
The ‘chance of harm’ was obviously high due to:
- Working at height
- Insufficient safety controls
- Inexperienced
- Untrained
- Unsupervised
- and not forgetting that younger men are bolder and more likely to ignore danger.
Very often we see claims for accidents and the first question is “Where is the risk assessment?”. In cases like this, the chances are we never even gave it a thought. The safety control measures that we put in place to safeguard against harm must take the highest priority as a piece of paper never stopped anyone getting hurt. What the paperwork does do is prove that we gave due consideration to the task and helped us comply with Health & Safety law.
Directors and managers need to be keenly aware that while we may have risk assessments on file for all the ‘everyday’ activities, it is the unusual and out of the ordinary occasional tasks that are more likely to cause harm.