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Contractor illegally engaged school age youth on building site
KB Building Services (Kevin Banks T/A) has been ordered to pay over £6k in fines and prosecution costs after a 14-year-old boy was injured when the dumper truck he was operating overturned on a construction site.
The one-tonne site dumper rolled over as it was being driven down a slope. The boy was not wearing a seat belt and he suffered serious leg and foot injuries.
Untrained workers operated dumper
The young boy was engaged despite it being illegal to employ children of ‘compulsory school age’ to work on building sites. A teenager is of compulsory school age if they have not yet got to the end of the school year in which they are 16.
HSE found that Mr Banks had failed to properly plan, manage and monitor the work to ensure the boy and others were not put at risk.
Other untrained employees had also driven the dumper truck, often without wearing seat belts, on some steep slopes.
Sue Adsett, HSE inspector, said:
“Children and construction work do not mix. As this incident shows, construction sites can be very dangerous, and children tend to have less experience and less awareness of what could go wrong.
Furthermore, anyone operating site dumpers should prove their competence to do so by holding an industry-recognised CPCS driver’s card.”
Kevin Banks, trading as KB Building Services, pleaded guilty to failing to comply with section 13(2) of the Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2007 and was fined £2,000 and ordered to pay costs of £4,052.
Comment
We are aware of 20 fatalities involving site dumpers over the last 10 years. In the majority of cases (13) the vehicle driver died after the dumper overturned.
Other deaths involved the dumper striking a pedestrian whilst moving forwards (3) or reversing (2). In two other cases the operator fell from the driving seat of the vehicle.