A Northamptonshire construction company has been fined £566,670 and ordered to pay costs of £9,000 after a tipper vehicle driven by one of its employees came into contact with overhead power lines (OPLs) during the construction of a waste transfer station.  The company had identified the need for protection structures but after an initial delay only one was installed. In order to empty the final remains of the load from his vehicle, the driver pulled forward with the body raised and the vehicle touched, or came close to touching, the 33KV OPL. The tipper vehicle suffered minor damage but the driver was unhurt.  An investigation by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) showed that the risks from OPLs should have been assessed more rigorously and that a thorough assessment of the system of work, reduce the risk of tipper vehicles striking an OPL, would have shown it to be inadequate.

A luxury yacht building company has been fined £167,000 and ordered to pay costs of £7,000 and a victim surcharge of £120 following an incident in which an engineer lost consciousness after being struck on the back of the head by a solid metal bracket.  The engineer was working under the hull of a twenty-six metre long yacht adjusting the height of a prop when the bracket came free. The engineer suffered a large laceration to the top of his head and lost consciousness. An investigation by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) into the incident, which occurred on 28 January 2016, found that the company failed to provide a safe system of work to ensure safety during the task of realigning the brackets on the hull of the yacht.

A London waste paper company has been sentenced fined £250,000 and ordered to pay costs of £6,639.77 and a victim surcharge of £170 after an employee was found dead, having suffered fatal crush injuries, inside the compaction chamber of a baling machine. An investigation by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) into the incident, which occurred on 27 March 2017, found the worker had fallen down the loading hopper into the compaction chamber of a baling machine. It is thought that he had been attempting to clear a blockage and that his fall into the chamber initiated the compaction sequence. Climbing up a baler to clear machine blockages exposes workers to the risk of falling a significant distance either into the compaction chamber or the surrounding concrete floor.

A national utilities company was fined £500,000 and ordered to pay costs of £195,000 after the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) found that workers at the company were exposed to hand-arm vibration between 2002 and 2011 which put them at risk of developing Hand-Arm Vibration Syndrome (HAVS). An investigation carried out by HSE found that the company failed in its legal duty to ensure the risks to workers who used these tools was kept to as low a level as reasonably practicable. The company also failed to report to the enforcing authorities a significant number of cases of employees diagnosed with HAVS as was legally required