Pet food manufacturer Butcher’s Pet Care has been fined £100,000 six years after a machine at its Northamptonshire factory crushed an employee to death. The firm’s operations director was also fined £10,000 for a rare offence of personally not preventing access to dangerous parts of machinery.
John O’Connor died on November 17 2003 while working on a PDP (palletiser-depalletiser) machine, which takes pet food cans off conveyor belts and stacks them on pallets. The employee climbed into the PDP’s caged area via a gap in the fencing between stair rails to try to correct a misaligned pallet. As he freed the pallet, the fully automatic machine started up, crushing him to death.
"The unfenced gap between the stair rails had been there for nearly two years", said HSE inspector Neil Craig, "and it was common practice for employees to nip through it to fix problems on the machine to make sure the production line kept running". Two or three other works had already done this on the day of the accident.
"Poor guarding arrangements led to this culture", said Craig. "One of the elements was production pressure; which led to employees to use all ways to enter the machine to get it going as quickly as possible. The equipment should have been fully enclosed, with a functioning interlock system to prevent anyone gaining access without the power being off".
In an unusual move, the HSE prosecuted director Philip Thompson as an individual using Regulation 3(3) of the Provision and Use of Work Equipment Regulations (PUWER), which imposes requirements on those who have control of work equipment to any extent.
Thompson initially denied a charge of breaching Section 2(1) of the Health and Safety at Work Act (brought under Section 37 of the Act) and the case was going to trial. A few days before the trial was due to begin, he pleaded guilty to a lesser but more stringent charge of failing to prevent access to dangerous parts of machinery, as required by Regulation 11(1) of PUWER
Judge Richard Bray fined Thompson £10,000 plus £4,000 costs at Northampton Crown Court in October. In sentencing, he pointed out that while Thompson claimed he didn’t know employees were entering the machine this way, as the director in charge of health and safety and a "self-described" hands-on director, he should have been aware that employees were putting their lives at risk.
At a separate hearing on 5 November, Judge Bray fined Butcher’s£100,000 with costs of £28,381 after it admitted failing to protect employees, as required under Section 2(1) of the Health and Safety at Work Act.