Companies fined £230,000 for health and safety breaches

Three companies have today (Friday) been fined a total of £230,000 for health and safety breaches.

Leicester's Lafarge Redland Aggregates Limited was fined £175,000 and Coventry's Pertemps Recruitment Partnership Limited fined £30,000 by Luton Crown Court for the death of a traffic management operative at the A6 on March 21 1999.

Simon Burton from Chesterfield was killed when he was struck by a vehicle when crossing the road to spray paint the position of a sign.

Meanwhile Seeboard Powerlink Ltd, a consortium made up Seeboard, Balfour Beatty and ABB, was fined £25,000 by London Magistrates' Court for exposing workers to asbestos at its Greenwich power station on November 12 and 13 2001.

The court decided that Seeboard had wrongly advised workers of Alstom Power Construction, and one of its own laggers, that no asbestos was present as thermal insulating was moved from a redundant alternator to a refurbished one.

The asbestos survey used related to a different alternator.

Both groups were exposed to significant amounts of white asbestos and substantial amounts of brown and blue asbestos as they carried out work on the alternator.

Seeboard Powerlink pleaded guilty to a breach of Regulation 8(1)(a) of the Control of Asbestos at Work Regulations 1987 for failing to prevent exposure to the lagger and was fined £5,000.

The consortium was also fined £20,000 for pleading guilty to a breach of Section 3(1) of the Health and Safety at Work, etc., Act 1974, for exposing Alstom's engineers.

Seeboard Powerlink was also ordered to pay the Health & Safety Executive's costs totalling £4,941.