26 May 2021
JP Mauger Ltd, through its legal representative, has asked for clarification on the following 3 points to be provided to the original article published by the Health and Safety Inspectorate on 19 April 2021.
1. The company disagrees with the statement that its employees were simply left to get on with the work without any specific information or instruction on how this was to be safely achieved.
In its judgement the Court stated ‘the culpability of the company is high by reason of a failure to prevent this accident and permitting this system of work to be operated at a time when the site was unsupervised’. The Court acknowledged that the employees had stated that they used the unsafe platform because it was already in place when they went to start their work. It also accepted the basis of the guilty plea being tendered, ie ‘that there was no anticipation on the part of the company that these two workers would do this work on the day on question, but it accepted that this scaffold had already been erected in the room in which the work was carried out’.
2. The company wishes it to be made clear that although the Court heard evidence about previous warnings being given about unsafe trestle scaffolds being seen on JMP sites, the company explained that the scaffolds concerned were not in use at the relevant times and were incomplete because they were either being erected or dismantled. This was not treated as an aggravating factor by the Court.
3. The photograph shown in the published article was a recreation of the scaffold, erected by one of the employees following the accident, not a photograph of the scaffold before its collapse.
A link to the original article is available.
JP Mauger Limited prosecuted following serious injury to employees: 19 April 2021
gov.je