A judge has this month warned that the courts would not tolerate firms breaching health and safety rules after Tulip Limited was forced to pay more than £286,000 in fines and costs after incidents at its Norfolk factory which left two workers injured.
One employee had the tips of his fingers sliced off by a machine and a self-employed handyman got an electric shock from a live light fitting in two separate accidents at the Tulip works at Thetford. The meat processing firm which closed most of its Claxton Way operations last year also failed to take steps to prevent falls from the ceiling of its production hall, Norwich Crown Court heard.
The company admitted three breaches of health and safety regulations and the court heard it was the third conviction in the past five years. It had also received 20 previous warnings over poor health and safety. In December 2006, the company was fined £130,000 after a worker was almost crushed to death in machinery at the King's Lynn factory. In passing sentence, Judge Peter Jacobs told the company that the only way to bring the message home about the importance of health and safety was to increase the amount they had been fined before.
He said, "The message has to go out from this court that this sort of attitude towards health and safety will not be tolerated. This is a company which is not doing its own risk assessment. This is a company who waits for something to go wrong, Health and Safety identify it, and then they put it right. It's not good enough."
As a result of these incidents, the company has held a comprehensive review of health and safety across all of their UK sites. Tulip Limited has since implemented a number of improvements to the management of health and safety across the group and is confident that all the necessary policies and procedures are now in place to ensure a safe working environment for its employees.
For more information, see:
