Cheshire Firm Pleads Guilty to Breaching Health and Safety
Proseal, a company based in Macclesfield, pleaded guilty to breaching health and safety rules after an incident that resulted in an employee losing two fingers in a workplace accident.
The worker, who was 34 at the time of the accident, was working with a lathe spinning at up to 850 times per minute as he polished a piece of metal when his right hand was dragged in to the machine resulting in his middle and ring finger being cut off to the second knuckle.
The incident, which took place on 24th March 2010 on Adlington Industrial Estate, occurred in part because the employee had been permitted to wear gloves while working with the machine despite the fact that it had been shown that wearing gloves while operating metalworking lathes posed a danger to workers. The Health and Safety Executive had first highlighted the dangers of such a practice some 20 years previously.
Proseal was fined £3,500 as well as being ordered to pay costs amounting to £3,807 after they plead guilty to breaching Section 2(2) of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974.
Lisa Lewis, the investigating inspector at HSE, had this to say after the hearing, “This was a needless injury which could easily have been avoided if Proseal had followed health and safety guidance, which is now nearly 20 years old. Proseal should have put more thought into the dangers its employees faced, and provided adequate training to reduce the risk of them being injured. If it had taken this action then a worker could have avoided losing two fingers.”
