Bakkavor fined £130k after employee broke ribs while crushed in machine

A food manufacturer has been fined after one of its employees at its Spalding site sustained two broken ribs having been crushed within an industrial cooking machine whilst working to clear a blocked water inlet.

Bakkavor pleaded guilty to a charge of breaching the Healthy and Safety Act by fined £130,000 and ordered to pay £2,607 costs following a hearing this week.

Lincoln Magistrates’ Court heard how on June 27, 2018 the employee was crushed in the ‘Cook, Quench, Chill’ machine after its safety systems were over-ridden and the machine worked on while it was live.

“It should have been isolated before work on it began,” the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) said in a statement. “An investigation carried out by the HHSE found that the task was carried out by the employees in this fashion on a regular basis and that the company should have been aware.

“No risk assessment of the task had been completed and employees had not been provided with a safe system of work to carry it out.

“The lack of a safe system of work for the task and the company’s failure to monitor how the work was done, led employees to devise their own way of conducting the procedure which included  over-riding the safety systems and using unsafe working practices.”

At the end of the trial HSE inspector Tim Nicholson commented: “Those in control of work have a responsibility to devise safe methods of working and to provide the necessary information, instruction and training to their workers.  If a suitable safe system of work had been in place prior to this incident, alongside good monitoring of the way the work was done, the injuries sustained by the employee could have been prevented.”

A spokesman for Bakkavor, said: “We very much regret that one of our employees was injured at work in an accident that took place on 27 June 2018.

“As a major food producer, we take the health and safety of our colleagues extremely seriously and always seek to achieve the highest possible standards of health and safety.

“We took prompt and effective steps to respond to the incident and cooperated fully with the HSE’s investigation.

“This was an isolated incident in a site with an excellent record of health and safety; the employee recovered and continues to work in our business.”