Logistics company found guilty after Teesside employee’s fatal fall
Logistics company Bertschi Ltd has been found guilty of health and safety offences following the death of a Teesside worker from a fall.
Logistics company Bertschi Ltd has been found guilty of health and safety offences following the death of a Teesside worker from a fall.
Respected warehouse supervisor Peter Hutchinson, 60, died after he fell about 5ft and hit his head while helping to load a shipping container with plastic bales. His employer Bertschi stood trial more than four years after the fatal accident at its site on Middlesbrough Road East, South Bank on November 4, 2021.
Today a jury unanimously convicted the firm on all counts it faced at Teesside Crown Court, after about a day’s deliberations. Bertschi had denied three offences of failing to do its duty under health and safety laws – one of ensuring employees’ health and safety and two relating to employees working at height.
The two-week trial heard how married dad-of-three Mr Hutchinson was trying to help a colleague, who was operating a fork lift truck, when he went on to the mobile loading ramp. The prosecution argued the accident would not have happened if Bertschi had planned properly and done more to control the risks to its workers.
James Puzey, prosecuting for the Health and Safety Executive, said the company made “important omissions” and “missed opportunities”. He said the ramp could have had handrails and the company could have included pedestrians using the ramp in its risk assessments and procedures – both rectified since the accident.
The prosecution also argued the job – the first time the company had loaded the bales, weighing nearly half a tonne each, into a container – could have been done from ground level. Mr Puzey told jurors: “The case is about the risk for people such as Mr Hutchinson falling from a loading ramp, and what Bertschi could and should have done to control that risk.”
He said it was “readily foreseeable that Mr Hutchinson would want to intervene” when a problem emerged with the load as they fitted in the final bales. He said: “If Bertschi had properly planned this work then there could have been no fall from height.”
Bertschi maintained it took all reasonable and practicable steps to reduce and control the risk to employees of using a mobile ramp, giving instructions to workers to walk up the middle of the ramp and wear shoes before the accident, described by the defence as a “tragic, unexpected and unforeseen event”. But the prosecution said there was “no specific plan for this job”, or to deal with unstable loads.
Mr Puzey said an employee stepping on to the ramp to inspect the load was foreseeable, saying of Mr Hutchinson: “He was a long-standing, trusted employee. He was just trying to get the job done.
“It need not have been a fatal step for him to go on to the mobile ramp, if proper steps had been taken by Bertschi beforehand. We say it was entirely foreseeable what happened.”
Following the verdicts Judge Francis Laird KC, the Recorder of Middlesbrough, adjourned sentencing until July 17. He thanked jurors, saying: “It was a case with a very human element to it, bearing in mind the very tragic loss of Mr Peter Hutchinson’s life.”