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PUWER is the Provision and Use of Work Equipment Regulations and requires users of work equipment to carry out regular risk assessments which are documented and kept on file.
Machinery Safety Compliances Services Ltd (MSCS) is set to make an impact at The Health & Safety Event 2024, held at the NEC, from April 30 to May 2. The event promises to be an exceptional opportunity for businesses seeking practical safety solutions to empower their workplaces.
Attendees are invited to explore the MSCS exhibit at stand 4/F52, where the company will showcase its latest innovations and expertise in machinery safety compliance. With an emphasis on practicality and hands-on...
12/07/2022
This exciting role gives you opportunities to become a valued member of a small team and gain expertise in machinery safety. As the company expands, this role is ideally positioned to grow responsibility. Staged training will be given to the successful candidate to build knowledge and experience and confidence to become an excellent and respected consultant.
The key purpose of this role is to provide clients with a compliance service related to machine safety in respect to guarding and safety...
15 December 2020
There are plenty of conditions in which a machine would require to be inspected that are fully covered in PUWER regulation 6 to ensure healthy and safety conditions are maintained to a high standard.
A requirement of PUWER is that an individual considered to be a competent person, must examine, and test the machinery before it is first used. This is what’s known as a PUWER Inspection.
But the story does not end there. Just like your fixed wiring, PUWER is a statutory inspection and must be...
30 June 2020
It doesn't matter what kind of workplace you're in, every employer is duty-bound to comply with health and safety regulations to protect employees from exposure to hazards that could affect their health or cause serious bodily harm, this can be related to manual handling tasks, the operation of workplace equipment such as machinery or display screens, therefore implementing a solid health and safety strategy is one of the wisest things you can do for your business.
How you implement such a...
6 December 2019
On 5 September 2018, two employees of Sulzer Electro Mechanical Services (UK) were standing on the chuck of a large vertical boring machine at a site in Bordesley, Birmingham, to set it. The start button was inadvertently pressed and, despite the interlocked perimeter fencing access doors being open, the chuck started to rotate.
Health and Safety Executive (HSE) investigators revealed that the interlocks on the perimeter fencing access doors were not working, and there were no safety checks in...
30 July 2019
A Northampton-based engineering firm has been fined after an operator was crushed while making moulds for a casting machine.
The RSM Castings employee, who has asked to remain anonymous, sustained extensive injuries on 11 April 2018, including a broken neck, back fractures, broken ribs, a fractured shoulder blade, a ruptured spleen and torn liver, a punctured lung, facial fractures and loss of teeth.
He has not yet been able to return to work due the severity of his injuries.
Northampton...
4 April 2019
2 Sisters Food Group was ordered to pay £1.4m plus costs of £38,000 in late March after an employee sustained serious crush injuries on a poultry slaughtering line at its factory on the Foxhills Industrial Estate in Scunthorpe, North Lincolnshire, in September 2012.
Doncaster Magistrates’ Court was told that the worker was struck by a large metal stillage as he tried to clear a conveying blockage. His body was crushed at chest height against the end of the unit and he sustained a punctured...
7 March 2019
Hendon Magistrates’ Court was told that Renault Retail Group was warned the lifts in Coulsdon and West London were defective and dangerous.
Investigating, the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) found that, between 5 October 2015 and 29 September 2016, the company failed to prevent workers operating the vehicle lifts and this put its technicians in danger. Renault Retail Group pleaded guilty to breaching reg 5(1) of the Provision and Use of Work Equipment Regulations (PUWER) and reg 10(3)(a) of...
6th April 2019
FFI was designed to recover costs incurred by the HSE during regulatory action against organisations that fail to comply with safety and health law, thus transferring the financial burden from the taxpayer to the business.
The new charge came into effect on 6 April 2019 and it is the second increase since the scheme was introduced in October 2012. The rate first went up in 2016, from £124. In a statement, the HSE said this can be attributed in part to the fact that the scheme has operated...
12 February 2019
Food manufacturer 2 Sisters Food Group has been fined a total of £274,000 after two workers sustained hand injuries at its poultry factory in Flixton, Suffolk.
The incidents happened in the evisceration room, where about 200 birds a minute are processed on a shackle line, which hoists up the carcasses into a vertical position. Romas Ciurlionis, who is originally from Lithuania, had been shown how to remove intestines from carcasses for the first time in March 2016. One hour into his shift on...
5 December 2018
Tarsem Singh, 52, died of a heart attack a day after the accident at Nylacast Engineering Plastic Solutions in Leicester in April 2016. An inquest heard the end cap of a pressurised moulding machine blew off and hit him at a speed of up to 80mph, fracturing his chest and jaw.
A safety expert said the machine had not been properly risk assessed.
The rod was secured in the machine by a pressurised piston, which should have been depressurised before the rod was removed. As Singh was removing the...
28 September 2018
A waste operative for B&W Waste Management Services sustained third-degree burns when he was engulfed in a fireball created when a spark from a forklift truck ignited a cloud of gas from the canisters.
He was put in a medically-induced coma for ten days on a life-support machine, has undergone several operations, and relies on medication for nerve pain. The forklift driver was also burned. The two operatives were working inside the company’s warehouse at Twinwoods Business Park in Milton...
28 September 2018
Tyre maker Pirelli Tyres has been fined more than £500,000 after two employees were injured in separate incidents at its factory in Carlisle, Cumbria.
The in-running nip on the let-off unit was unguarded
Both accidents happened on the let-off machine, a unit at the start of the production line comprising a reel wrapped with rubber ply, and a bobbin. During operation, the rubber ply was fed on to the conveyor belt while the protective liner wound around the bobbin. On 29 November 2013, machine...
29 October 2018
A Liverpool-based waste and recycling company has been fined £700,000 and its director handed an eight-month prison sentence after an employee died clearing a blockage in a baling machine.
Gaskells (North West) and its director Jonathan Gaskell were sentenced both for their part in the death of Polish national Zbigniew Galka in 2010, and for continuing to operate the baler unsafely for up to five years after the fatality. A joint Health and Safety Executive (HSE) and Merseyside Police...
29 September 2018
A timber products company that reclaims tropical hardwood must pay £12,000 after it repeatedly put employees at risk by failing to safely guard and maintain woodwork equipment.
Barkingside Magistrates’ Court was told that employees could have been seriously injured because Ashwell Recycled Timber Products had not fitted a radial arm drilling machine with an effective telescopic guard or trip device.
Health and Safety Executive (HSE) inspectors found also that the housing on a re-saw blade and...
1 June 2018
A waste paper management company has been fined £250,000 after an employee was fatally crushed inside a baling machine. The worker fell down the baling machine's hopper into the compactor chamber
RRS London was sentenced at Westminster Magistrates’ Court over the accident in Erith, south-east London, on 27 March 2017.
The Health and Safety Executive’s (HSE) investigation found it was “most likely” the worker fell down the baling machine’s hopper and into the compactor chamber while clearing...
11 May 2018
A maintenance fitter who died after he was trapped in a conveyor used a spare safety key to access a guarded enclosure and work on the machinery while it was still powered up.
Precast concrete products manufacturer CPM Group was fined £660,000 after 43-year-old fitter Jeffery Baulf was fatally crushed when the conveyor started moving as he was carrying out maintenance work at the company’s plant in Frome, Somerset on 3 October 2016.
The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) discovered that Baulf’...
13 Nov 2017
The managing director and former operations director of a recycling firm have been handed prison sentences and the company fined £800,000 after failing to prevent an operative from being drawn into a conveyor, along the line through a trommel and into an industrial waste shredder.
Latvian Karlis Pavasars was working for Mid-UK Recycling at the firm’s Barkston Heath site near Ancaster in Lincolnshire when the incident happened on 19 July 2013.
Pavasars, an agency worker, was cleaning near a...
26 Feb 2018
A food manufacturer has been fined £40,000 after a worker sustained serious injuries when the sleeve of his overcoat was caught in a large industrial food mixer.
The machine was fitted with an interlock bowl guard to prevent access to its rotating mixing arm but it had been deliberately overridden, the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) investigation found.
The worker’s injuries included broken ribs, a collapsed lung, and a large blood clot under the armpit.
Kamkee Food, of Hamlet Court Road...
16 Feb 2018
Mark Goodge had been using an emery cloth to clean by hand steel shafts on the lathe at Marcantonio Foods’ factory in Barking, Westminster Magistrates’ Court was told.
Goodge’s gloves became entangled in the lathe and his lost four fingers on his right hand, broke several bones in his left arm and sustained a dislocated wrist.
The Health and Safety Executive’s (HSE) investigation found Marcantonio had no safe system of work for cleaning the metal shafts.
It was not an “isolated incident”, the...
4 July 2017
Managers and company directors convicted of gross negligence manslaughter could face longer jail terms in cases where they have disregarded employee safety to save money, under new proposals published by the Sentencing Council.
The draft guideline covers four types of manslaughter.
The first – gross negligence – occurs when the offender breaches their duty of care towards the victim, resulting in death and amounting to a criminal act or omission. In the workplace this covers employers whose...
21st April 2017
Coventry-based Beckett’s Foods was fined this week at Coventry Magistrates’ Court. The court heard that on 11 May 2016, a 22 year old worker was loading meat into the machine, when he fell and his hand was drawn into it. The worker suffered serious injuries to his hand, later requiring surgery and skin grafts.
The HSE found that the company failed implement a safe system of work for separating the meat using this machinery, and that it had failed to provide the appropriate level of guarding to...
20th April 2017
Whirlpool has revised its procedures for co-ordinating contractors’ work after a fire alarm engineer died when he fell from a work platform.
Dalley was standing on an elevating mobile platform between two of the carriage baskets suspended from the conveyor. Maintenance workers could not see Dalley from the conveyor’s control panel in the middle of the factory. They started the conveyor and one of the carriage baskets caught on the platform, toppling it. Dalley fell to the ground, sustaining...
12th April 2017
A bakery that did not fit machines at its Penrith, Cumbria site with the correct guards has been fined £70,000 after two workers sustained injuries to their hands. Carlisle Magistrates’ Court was told that a Bells of Lazonby employee lost the top of his middle finger on his right hand on 26 January 2016 after it caught the moving blade of a dough dividing machine.
Two months later, on 29 March, another worker was hurt when his left index finger came into contact with the cutting jaws of...
8th March 2017
Bedmax Limited failed to protect its employee from dangerous parts of machinery. On 26 October 2015 Philip Eyers was operating the log deck, which is part of a machine that shreds trees, when his foot slipped and became lodged in a gap exposing him to the wheels of the machine which conveyed the logs. The severity of the injuries to his toes meant his big toe was cut back several times, his other four were fractured and eventually reconstructive surgery was required.
A Health and Safety...
22nd february 2017
A packaging manufacturer has been served a reduced £297,000 fine after a Health and Safety Executive (HSE) inspector uncovered poor, longstanding practices involving electrics and machine guarding at the company’s premises in Northfleet in Kent during September 2014. Under the sentencing guidelines the court could have set the penalty as high as £2.5m but the company’s poor trading position and swift remedial action led to a more lenient sentence.
The breaches included unsecured cabinet doors...
9th February 2017
The HSE issued a statement on 9 February outlining its plans to hold a consultation on the make-up of the panel that adjudicates on disputed FFI invoices. Health and Safety at Work understands that the statement followed a meeting between OCS Group and the HSE where the two sides came to an agreement to halt the legal proceedings.
This essentially means that regulator has voluntarily taken up a position that it might have been forced into if the scheduled judicial review hearing had gone ahead...
6th Feb 2017
The full Judicial Review hearing in the High Court has been brought forward to March of this year regarding the dispute process of HSE’s Fee for Intervention Scheme (FFI).
In 2011 the government published its proposals for the reform of health and safety entitled Good Health and Safety, Good for Everyone. In it, they stated that:“it is reasonable that businesses that are found to be in serious breach of health and safety law – rather than the taxpayer – should bear the related costs incurred by...
25 January 2017
Jaguar Land Rover have been fined £900,000 after one of its workers was crushed between two cars at its plant in Solihull. Victim Mark Widnall lost a leg as a result of the incident in February 2015.
The manufacturer was also ordered to pay £49,864 after a jury at Birmingham Crown Court convicted it of breaching health and safety regulations.
Birmingham Crown Court heard that on Sunday 8 February 2015 at Jaguar’s Lode Lane plant in Solihull, a Range Rover Sport vehicle was driven toward the...
27 January 2017
When it comes to supplier risk, understanding the strength of your suppliers is crucial to managing the supply chain. Today, more businesses recognize that even small supplier disruptions can result in losses to their own revenue, customer satisfaction or credibility.
When it comes to health and safety inspections, there are further considerations for you to consider. Those risk assessments often contain evidence of material breaches. This is sensitive information and data security should be of...
16 December 2016
A textile manufacturing company and one of its directors, Wazir Hussain were sentenced after a fatal accident to the company’s Managing Director, 36 year old Nasir Hussain.
On the 1 February 2012 the carding machine forming part of a production line at Felt Supplies Ltd Dewsbury, had become blocked with waste. Nasir Hussain, brother of Wazir Hussain, gained access to the line whilst it was still running.
Leeds Crown Court heard how Nassir overrode the safety system using a spare key to unlock...
17 November 2016
A maintenance company has appeared in court after a worker suffered serious injuries after falling 7 metres. The worker, suffered fractures to his left foot in the incident on the 9 July 2014.
The incident was investigated by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) which found serious safety failings by Valmet Limited, an embedded contractor for the paper mill where the incident occurred at Manchester Road, Carrington, Manchester.
Manchester Crown Court heard today (17 November 2016) that the...
4 January 2016
We are excited to announce that our team has moved to a new location in Wellingborough. This is almost a double celebration for us, after completing our first ten years in business at our previous address, we are moving onwards and upwards.
We spent the previous years in the old Unilever Research Lab in Finedon, a building about 2 miles away from our new location. Our old office served us well, and we made great memories (and an EMC lab!) there, but we couldn't be more excited about our new...
11 Jul 2015
This year we celebrated our 10th birthday at the N90 group of companies. We started out as a two person team with the hope that we could make a difference. 10 years on, we have evolved into a confident safety engineering consultancy that has helped hundreds of amazing clients create a safe and profitable working environment.
During this time so much has changed but we are very proud of having more than 25 years’ experience within the Safety and Engineering sectors, supplying a complete range of...
