Work at height

An award-winning engineer and a former head of safety at John Lewis discuss the dangers of making assumptions about the causes of escalator accidents, and how best to encourage safe behaviour among members of the public.

A company that manufactures and supplies artificial trees has been fined £40,000 after one of its staff fell five metres from a ladder and suffered serious injuries while trying to retrieve stock.

A company has been fined £40,000 after a worker fell 36ft (11 metres) and was left paralysed from the waist down when the concrete floor he was working on collapsed beneath him.

A labourer working at mezzanine level suffered skull fractures and a brain injury because of the negligence of his employers.

Rotherham’s Principal Environmental Health Officer Adrian Monkhouse explains how a crane engineer’s six-metre fall resulted in fines totalling £100,000 and a renewed focus on contractor safety.

A Birmingham tyre firm and its landlord have been fined a total of £43,333 at Birmingham Magistrates’ Court after pleading guilty to breaching health and safety legislation.

Very tall constructions are still seeing workers killed every year. But experts argue that while the extreme height is what kills, being prepared is what prevents it.

A roofer and scaffolder who have been prosecuted over a fatal fall from the roof of a two-storey terraced house did not put simple preventative measures in place to avoid the incident.

Covid disruption, wide scale furloughing of workers and a 10% reduction in weekly hours worked has been accompanied by a 28% year-on-year increase in the number of work-related fatal accidents, according to Great Britain’s annual fatality statistics.

In a new series exploring core OSH topics and your role in ensuring their risks are well managed, we look at working at height.