Agenda item

Health and Safety Lessons Learnt (Local Authority Specific) - Verbal

Minutes:

The Sub-Committee received a verbal report from the Service Manager (Health and Safety) on the following health and safety updates:

 

1)   Newcastle City Council: Fined over a 6-year-olds death from a falling tree.  The young girl was hit by a falling tree at Gosforth Park First School on 25 September 2020, and subsequently died the following morning in hospital.

 

The tree had become an “accident waiting to happen” after the council failed to properly investigate its condition following an inspection in February 2018 which identified the need for another detailed look at it within six months.

 

Newcastle City Council pleaded guilty on 10 January 2023 under Section 3(1) of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 and were fined £280,000 and ordered to pay costs of £8,020.

 

2)   BUPA: On 8 January 2021 a girl was out for an evening jog with her father.  As she was running on a pavement outside the entrance to the care home, a lime tree fell on her.  She suffered serious crush injuries and her leg had to be amputated.  It was subsequently found that the tree was diseased with a common fungus and had likely been rotting for several years prior to the accident.

 

Bupa Care Homes pleaded guilty to a breach of Section 3(1) of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 and received a fine of £400,000. The company was also ordered to pay costs of £3,275 and an undisclosed victim surcharge.

 

3)   Stress: Absence from work resulting from stress continues to be the highest cause of sickness absence and increasingly employers were introducing or consolidating steps to address both work related and non-work related stress.

 

Th estimated number of workers in Great Britain suffering a work-related illness was 1.8 million with stress, depression, and anxiety making up around half of cases, new figures showed.

 

The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) had published its annual statistics on work-related ill health and workplace injuries.  The figures from Great Britain’s workplace regulator showed there was an estimated 914,000 cases of work-related stress, depression, or anxiety in 2021/22.

 

An estimated 17 million working days were lost due to work-related stress, depression, or anxiety in 2021/22. This is over half of all working days lost due to work-related ill health.

 

The HSE Stress Working Group which will identify its priorities within this work strand going forward.

 

The Sub-Committee considered the lessons learnt and asked questions to which responses were provided. 

 

In particular detailed discussions were held tree inspections, and whether the council was confident that its own trees had been inspected and were safe.  The Sub-Committee was advised that all trees owned by the council were inspected and logged on an electronic system called Arbi-trace.  Tree inspections were generated, and any defects were recorded and put into a scheduled of works.

 

In response to a question raised about trees and parish councils, the Sub-Committee was informed that the council’s tree officers worked with parish councils but did not have the resource to carry out additional tree inspections. 

 

The Service Manger (Health and Safety) advised that he was happy to provide the locality officers with the slides for information.  It was also suggested whether some advice could be provided to SALC on trees to be circulated to parish councils to make them aware of the dangers of not inspecting trees regularly.

 

There being no decisions required the Sub-Committee noted the verbal report.