A builder has been fined after two of his workers were photographed on a house roof in Burnley without safety measures in place.
Mohammed Yasin, who trades as Southfield Property Maintenance, was prosecuted by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) following the incident at a semi-detached house on Matlock Grove on 10 April 2014.
Burnley Magistrates’ Court heard a passing HSE inspector spotted the men installing a dormer window for a loft conversion at the property.
Mr Yasin, 39, was inside the house and his two workers were close to the chimney on the outside, without any scaffolding or other safety measures to prevent them from being injured in a fall.
Mohammed Yasin, of Larch Street, Nelson, was fined £2,000 and ordered to pay £400 in prosecution costs after pleading guilty to a breach of the Work at Height Regulations 2005.
Speaking after the hearing, HSE Inspector Jacqueline Western, said:
“It’s astonishing that Mr Yasin was prepared to carry out a construction project that involved major roof work, without putting safety measures in place to protect the people he employed.
“While he worked safely inside the house, the lives of two men were being put at risk as they clambered about on the roof. The work simply shouldn’t have been allowed to go ahead without the use of scaffolding or other safety equipment.
“The risks from working at height are well known in the construction industry. It is therefore only luck that no one was injured on this occasion.”
Information on working safely at height is available at www.hse.gov.uk/work-at-height[2].
Notes to Editors
- The Health and Safety Executive is Britain’s national regulator for workplace health and safety. It aims to reduce work-related death, injury and ill health. It does so through research, information and advice, promoting training, new or revised regulations and codes of practice, and working with local authority partners by inspection, investigation and enforcement. www.hse.gov.uk[3].
- Regulation 6(3) of the Work at Height Regulations 2005 states: “Where work is carried out at height, every employer shall take suitable and sufficient measures to prevent, so far as is reasonably practicable, any person falling a distance liable to cause personal injury.”
- HSE news releases are available at http://press.hse.gov.uk/[4].
