Lynn firm fined £115,000 after lorry driver suffers life-changing injuries

Dickies Pet Centre and its managing director, Richard Ellwood, have been sentenced at court after lying about how a lorry driver sustained life-changing injuries.

The company was fined £115,000 and also ordered to pay more than £70,000 costs - figures which the judge said were much higher than they need have been because inaccurate information was given at the time.

Because of Ellwood’s early guilty plea, District Judge King, at Chelmsford Magistrates Court, gave him credit by not imprisoning him, and sentenced him instead to a 12-month community order with a 200-hour unpaid work requirement.

The charges were brought West Norfolk Council, as health and safety enforcement authority, following the accident at Dickies Pet Centre's Oldmedow Road site, on June 25.

A palleted load of pet bedding was being unloaded from a delivery lorry by a fork-lift truck driven by Ellwood. The fork-lift truck lifted the load with its lifting forks too closely spaced together, so that they went into the wrong apertures in the pallet and could not support it properly when lifting it. The laden truck was then manoeuvred away from the lorry and the load of bedding, which weighed more than 800Kg, and was more than 2.5 metres tall, fell onto the delivery lorry driver.

The lorry driver, a previously very active man, sustained life-changing injuries as a result – fractures to his neck vertebrae – which have left him tetraplegic. He cannot move from the neck down, and has a permanent need for 24-hour care to assist him with everyday tasks, even breathing. His life expectancy has been reduced.

The court was told Dickies Pet Centre had not assessed the risks as should have been done, did not have a safe system of work for the unloading of delivery vehicles, Ellwood had not been trained in the operation of fork-lift trucks since 2005, and Dickies Pet Centre's fork-lift truck had long been operated without access to any copy of the manufacturer's manual.

Dickies Pet Centre had previously pleaded guilty to an offence of failing to fulfil its duty under Section 3(1) of the Health and Safety Act, to ensure those it did not employ were not exposed to risk by the way it ran its business.

Ellwood had previously pleaded guilty to an offence of being a director who consented to or connived in the company's offence, or to whose neglect that offending was attributable.

In court, defence counsel, Matthew Kerruish-Jones, accepted that the defendants had acted dishonestly during the investigation, and said that whilst Mr. Ellwood did not set out to cause an accident or injury, it was accepted that his actions, or lack of actions, led to the injury to the lorry driver.

Judge King, sentencing, said that this was an incident which did not need to occur and that unloading vehicles was done around the country, without resulting injuries. There was no reason why this incident should have been any different, but due to the failing of the defendants this was not to be the case.

He was critical of Ellwood for rushing to proceed with the unloading without checking the spacing of the forks of the fork-lift truck, ensuring they were correctly spaced for the pallet to be lifted, ensuring that they were inserted into the correct aperture of that pallet, ensuring that the pallet be lowered from lorry bed height to ankle height before being moved away from the immediate area of the delivery lorry, and ensuring that pedestrians, such as the lorry driver, were warned and kept out of the way. Judge King explained that because these steps, which would have taken minimal time, were not done, tragic consequences followed for the lorry driver.

In the aftermath of the incident, Ellwood told his or his insurer’s independent safety investigator that the load had fallen because the pallet had broken, and he did not admit that the wrong spaced forks going into the wrong apertures in the pallet was the real reason for what happened.

Later he told a different story, also blaming the pallet, also concealing the misplacing of the forks, and also wrong, to the local authority, when making a statement under caution. Judge King said that this inaccurate information aggravated his and his company’s offending and increased the sentences passed upon each of them.

Dickies Pet Centre's fine was also reduced because of its plea and that it was a very small company with no previous health and safety breaches but the high culpability, serious harm to the lorry driver and the aggravation of the inaccurate information, meant that even so, the fine was £115,000.

Vicki Hopps, the borough council's environmental health manager, said: “This incident shows the potentially devastating consequences for anyone caught up in the mishandling of delivered goods, and, as these proceedings show, failing to reach the minimum safety standards set by law may lead to serious consequences for the businesses responsible and for those individuals running those businesses.”

Cllr Stuart Dark, borough council leader, said: "There is no success in the aftermath of a serious accident like this and its life-changing impact on the individual and their family. What we hope is that others will learn from this incident and take their responsibilities around health and safety seriously.”