Three companies have been fined a total of £420,000 after a boy’s skull was fractured by a falling slate tile.
Rocare Building Services and Quadra Built Environmental Consultancy were fined along with the owners of the Moonfleet Manor Hotel in Weymouth, Dorset, where the three-year-old girl was hit by the tile in June 2019.
The girl was leaving the hotel with her father and brother after a swimming lesson when she was hit by a tile that fell from the roof. She was taken to hospital and placed in an induced coma before a two-hour operation removed shards of slate from her head.
Rocare Building Services, based in Hampshire, had been appointed as the main contractor overseeing the hotel’s refurbishment works, which also included replacing windows and restoring chimneys and gutters.
The company was re-roofing and had begun replacing the old roofing materials with new shingles that had been stacked around the finished roof.
It was one of these tiles that fell five meters to the ground, injuring the girl.
An investigation by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) found that scaffolding at the site was not fit for purpose because it did not have sufficient measures to prevent items from falling, such as protective fans, catwalks roofs or at least brick protections around the entire perimeter. .
It also found that Quadra Built Environmental Consultancy, the Gloucestershire-based company hired as lead designer responsible for planning, managing and monitoring the pre-construction phase, had failed at the planning and design stage to properly assess risks of falling objects from a height.
Moonfleet Manor “ignored requests” and failed to take action to address the “obvious danger” of falling objects coming into contact with members of the public using the busy pool pathway, according to a statement from the HSE.
The HSE said the judge in the case found the hotel was “more concerned with… guest comfort and preventing the hotel from looking like a construction site than the safety of its guests”.
At Bournemouth Crown Court on Tuesday (October 24), Rocare Building Services was fined £160,000 after pleading guilty to failing to comply with the Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2015 and Working at Height Regulations 2005 .
A £60,000 fine was imposed on Quadra Built Environmental Consultancy, which was also found guilty of breaching the Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2015.
However, the biggest fine was reserved for the hotel’s owner, LFH (Moonfleet Manor) Limited, who was ordered to pay £200,000 for breaching the Health and Safety at Work etc Act 1974.
HSE Inspector Nicole Buchanan said the incident had caused significant injury and extreme distress to the girl and her family and could have been fatal.
“Clients and construction companies must always remember their legal duty to maintain the safety of both workers and members of the public,” he said. “The client, principal designer and principal contractor have a duty to work together to implement industry standards to ensure members of the public are safe, particularly if a site is to remain live.”
