A Carlisle tyre firm has been ordered to pay a total of £40,000 for breaching health and safety legislation after being caught stacking dangerously high piles of tyres in a warehouse. Kings Road Tyres & Repairs Ltd were fined at Carlisle Crown Court after a jury found them guilty of failing to ensure the safety and welfare of their employees.
The jury also cleared the firm of two other charges linked to health and safety issues, which related to an accident in which a roofer fell through a dirty skylight. Judge Barbara Forrester issued the fine after taking into account several "aggravating factors" about the firm's storage of tyres, including a contravention of its own health and safety policy. In fact, they had already been warned of such dangers more than six years ago.
During the trial, the court heard and saw photographic evidence of two piles of tyres, large enough for wagons, stacked high in its Kingstown warehouse on Millbrook Road. One pile was 19 tyres high, while another was found leaning over into an aisle.
Passing sentence, Judge Forrester said, "The aisle in the warehouse was used by forklifts and/or pickers to get tyres and equipment to be fitted to vehicles. The breaches I refer to are all contrary to the health and safety policy of the company itself. There have been no accidents in relation to the storage of tyres either at this depot or any of the other eight owned by the company, but this section of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 is aimed at imposing duties on employers to protect their employees so there is no need for there to have been an accident. However, if there had been an incident involving the way these were stacked it could have been very serious, leading to an injury or death because of the amount, the weight and type of individual tyres and the height which they could have fallen."
