Go to jail

Neither of the Redgates had any experience of demolishing kilns or preparing for demolition. There was no planning supervisor nor safety plan in place before work began, for which the client, tile manufacturer Daniel Platt, was hit with a fine of £125,000 plus £10,000 costs, for breaches of the CDM Regulations. Platt had structural drawings on site of the disused kiln, but hadn’t made them available to Dean or his workers.

Not enough chiefs
Dean, 60, who retired in May, owned and managed B Dean Demolition and Civil Engineers, employing five permanent staff. He was the only manager. His firm had been in business for 15 years and he had considerable experience in the construction industry. The project at Daniel Platt was worth £17,500 and had been under way for two weeks before the kiln collapsed.

Construction directors in boardrooms around the country will have taken nervous note of the case, but will it lead to a flood of personal convictions? Will construction bosses be sentenced for manslaughter on a regular basis?

The short answer is no. The Dean case hasn’t changed the law and it is still only possible to pin down small companies for workplace manslaughter.

The Crown Prosecution Service says for it to bring a case of workplace manslaughter to court, it not only requires proof of a breach of a duty of care, but also evidence of a guiding mind. Providing evidence of a guiding mind is the key stumbling block for prosecutions.

The decision that leads to a fatal accident has to be directly attributable to one individual, the “guiding mind” in charge of and responsible for the job. This is the reason why only small firms are likely to be prosecuted; larger companies can hide behind chains of management. Dean, for example, owned and ran the business, supervising every job it undertook. There was no one else for him to blame, no other manager or director to point the finger at.

He knew what he was doing and that it was wrong, but went on doing it

Rosie Edwards, HSE

Beating the rap
When an accident happens on a larger site, a site manager can always lay the blame on company procedure. If no one person is responsible for writing that procedure it is all but impossible to identify a single guiding mind that caused the accident. In any case, it is the directors of a company who are ultimately responsible for the activities of their company, and they can quite legitimately claim to have no specific knowledge of what is going on at each site in their charge.

So why was Dean found guilty? In summing up, Judge John Shand highlighted the fact that he was clearly unqualified to do the kiln job. “You took on this job of demolishing a tunnel kiln when, bluntly, you were out of your depth,” he said.

Dean only won the contract by undercutting his competitor by £8,000 and his disregard for the necessary knowledge and experience required to carry out the work helped to prove a breach of a duty of care.

Also, the decisions taken that led to the accident could easily be attributed to Dean. The Redgates removed the internal material framework of the kiln that was holding the structure in place, and it was this that caused the collapse. Dean had given them no advice or instruction on how to demolish the kiln, even though such information is freely available. He also left them unsupervised for the first week of the job because he had other work on, and they were unsupervised at the time of the accident. His decisions can therefore be directly linked to the cause of the accident.

Detective Inspector Roger Dutton, who led the investigation, said the evidence of negligence was clear. “It was obvious from day one that things that should have been done hadn’t been and that Dean was grossly negligent. It was clear that he was out of his depth.”

Platt’s escape
Dutton considered pursuing the client, Daniel Platt, for manslaughter, but couldn’t identify a guiding mind at the company. “Platt put its hands up to health and safety offences straightaway,” said Dutton. “We considered going after the health and safety manager, but he had raised his concerns to his superiors about Brian Dean and they had decided to let him get on with it. He’d tried his best and had been ignored, so it was then difficult to determine who was responsible at Platt.”