Ready meals manufacturer Noon Products has been fined £20,000 after an employee cut off his fingertip in a dough dividing machine at its factory in Southall, London.
Noon, which produces chilled and frozen Indian ready meals, asked the worker to repair the broken-down dough divider on 17 February 2007. He had removed a guard and was cleaning the middle part of the un-isolated machine with a screwdriver and an air gun when a dangerous part severed the tip of his right index finger. A display screen designed to provide safety information to the operator was illegible and critical safety switches were disconnected.
The dough divider could run in normal production mode or in a special cleaning mode, which limited the movement of its dangerous parts. The underlying problem, HSE inspector Neil Fry told HSW, was that the broken display screen meant users could not tell in which mode the machine was running at any time. In fact, the poor overall state of the machine meant it was locked permanently into production mode. There was also a second dough divider in a similar bad condition at the site.
During a previous prosecution over a slip in a freezer room in 2006, the HSE had served Noon with an Improvement Notice for badly maintained trolley wheels. This referred to maintenance procedures generally and should have alerted the firm to their importance. There were the makings of a proper maintenance system in place, but the company had not gone far enough. Underpinning everything, said Fry, was a poor overall safety culture. "It was all about production; not about employee safety."