The operators of one of Britain’s most iconic stately homes have been fined £266,000 and ordered to pay costs of £16,863 after a butler was crushed to death by a lift. The luggage lift was being used to move guests’ bags from the ground to second floor in the private area of the house when one of the bags became jammed and the lift stopped. The butler attempted to free the jammed bags but the lift descended on him, trapping him between the lift cage and the banister of the stairwell housing the lift. Examination of the lift showed that it had not been fitted with a slack rope detector.
A waste management firm has been fined £125,000 for causing odour pollution at its Leeds and Bradford Sites and ordered to pay £75,000 costs. The company was prosecuted following repeated odour problems which had a detrimental effect on local residents. Between June 2012 and October 2013 Environment Agency officers carried out some seventy-five odour assessments most of which recorded smells which were likely to cause offence to human senses
A national facilities management company was fined £600,000, and ordered to pay costs of £15,498, for breaching Regulation 25 (4) of the Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2015. The fine resulted from an incident when an employee of a subcontractor, who was replacing a traffic light pole, came into contact with a live underground cable which gave him the electric shock and set him on fire.
NB Regulation 25(4) states that “construction work which is liable to create a risk to health or safety from an underground service, or from damage to or disturbance of it, must not be carried out unless suitable and sufficient steps (including any steps required by this regulation) have been taken to prevent the risk, so far as is reasonably practicable”.
Thames Water Utilities Ltd was fined £20 Million for causing six separate pollution events on the Thames over a two-year period to 2014. Investigations carried out by Environment Agency officers revealed a catalogue of failures by TWUL management. This involved repeated discharges of untreated or poorly treated raw sewage into rivers, disregarding risks identified by their own staff and failing to react adequately to thousands of high priority alarms used to alert them to the serious problems.