Concrete company bosses jailed

Prosecutions and Claims |
15.09.2007

Two managers of a concrete manufacturing firm have been jailed for the gross negligence manslaughter of a worker who died after becoming tangled in an unguarded conveyor. Their firm, the Concrete Company, which also pleaded guilty to manslaughter, is the largest company ever convicted of the offence in the UK.

At Norwich Crown Court in July, Judge Jacobs sentenced managing director Timothy Dighton to a year in prison and area manager Roy Burrows to nine months. He fined the Concrete Company, which has an annual turnover of £11 million and employs around 100 people, £75,000 with £89,000 costs.

Christopher Meachen, a father of three, had been working at the company's branch in Costessey in Norfolk for just a few months. He was working alone on 7 November 2005 in a 3m-deep pit, clearing aggregate from round a slew conveyor used to carry stones and sand. There were no guards around the tail end of the conveyor and he became caught up in the machinery. Colleagues discovered his body just after 9am. A post-mortem showed he died from multiple injuries. 

Detective Inspector Richard Graveling of Norfolk Police, which led the joint police/HSE investigation, said officers had treated Meachen's death as "a major crime from the start". Describing the defendants' attitude to health and safety as "cavalier", he added that if the firm had put remedial safeguards round the conveyor, Meachen would still be alive.

"The lugs were there for a guard to be fitted," said HSE principal inspector Frank Sykes. "They could have made a guard in-house ... for a few hundred pounds, if that." Even buying a new guard from the manufacturer would only have cost around £2000, he added. As well as being unguarded, there was no means for isolating the conveyor during maintenance or for switching it off in an emergency. The investigation also found that the firm had no effective system of risk assessment for its plant, machinery and working practices.

Dighton denied knowing that the machinery was unguarded. But sentencing him, Judge Jacobs said it did not matter whether he knew or not; he should have known and if there had been proper health and safety measures in place, he would have found out.

After the incident, HSE inspectors visited the company's 13 sites, issuing at least 12 enforcement notices covering falls from height, personal protective equipment, machinery guarding, safe systems of work, transport management, lifting operations and electrical systems. "Effectively, there was no health and safety within this company," Sykes told HSW. The HSE will be monitoring the firm and continuing to work with it to make improvements until "we are entirely happy", he added. 

On top of the manslaughter charge, the Concrete Company pleaded guilty to failing to ensure the safety of employees as required under Section 2(1) of the Health and Safety at Work Act. Dighton admitted the same offence by virtue of Section 37(1) of the Act in that it was committed due to his neglect. There were no separate penalties for the health and safety offences.