Friday 19 December 2014

Leisure Products fined £10,500 for failing to guard milling machine

Leisure Products Ltd., a Kent firm that makes safety surfaces for playgrounds was fined £10,500 (inc. costs) after it failed to heed warnings from safety experts to properly guard dangerous machinery.
The circumstances were:
  • Island Leisure were issued with a prohibition notice in June 2010 when an HSE inspector had found a milling machine being used without any guards to protect workers from dangerous moving parts. 
  • The notice prevented any further use of the machine until effective guarding was installed, and was originally complied with.
  • On a visit on 11 December 2013 visit, HSE found the same machine in use, but again with no safety guarding.
  • The HSE prosecuted the company for failing to ensure that effective guarding was in place to prevent operators from getting too close to the rotating parts of the machine.

The HSE inspector said:
“Fortunately, no one at the factory was injured but this was down to chance rather than any good management. Island Leisure once again neglected safety and seemed to have disregarded any lesson learned from HSE’s enforcement action on the exact same machine back in 2010. To return to the same premises and find the identical dangers still very much apparent is totally unacceptable. There was very real risk of entanglement of workers’ hands in the moving parts leading to lacerations at best, amputation of hands at worst.”

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