Home > Safety Dave’s Blog > UK Boss Jailed after WAH Fatality
6/02/2009 - UK Boss Jailed after WAH Fatality
A ROOFING firm boss has been jailed for a year and his company ordered to pay £30,000 after being convicted of the manslaughter of a young employee who fell to his death through a roof.
Colin Cooper, 48, of London Road, Hailsham, was accused by the judge at his Hove Crown Court trial of having neglected health and safety, using safety precautions only as a way of wowing future customers.
His family looked on as the director, who had been in the roofing industry for 27 years, was sentenced.
He was told that the jail term would be a warning to small companies that they could not avoid their safety obligations.
Cooper was arrested in March 2006 after his employee, 20-year-old Darren Hoofe, fell 20 ft through a roof at an industrial estate in Uckfield.
A jury found him and his company guilty of manslaughter, after hearing that Mr Hoofe had not been wearing a harness when he fell and had no safety net to catch him.
The roofing company had used two crawling boards for workers to walk across the roof, when another firm tendering for the job had recommended 12.
Judge Anthony Scott-Gall said the defendant’s attitude to health and safety had been “perfunctory” and added, “What the court does find is that the desire for health and safety policies was more to impress potential contractors than for safety for employees, ie it was a sort of badge or ticket that could be produced so as to ensure a successful quotation.”
Mr Hoofe had been working for Upper Dicker-based IC Roofing for just six months when he died.
Judge Scott-Gall said, “He was wholly untrained to work at height. He was not in any reality supervised at the critical time and he was provided with inadequate and insufficient materials to do the work required safely.”
A risk assessment carried out by Cooper, it was said, mistakenly identified the roof as being made of metal, as opposed to asbestos, which can be unstable.
The court heard Mr Hoofe’s grieving mother still waited for the daily telephone call she used to receive from her son more than three years after his death, and his family saw his death as ‘needless’.
Defending, Richard Body insisted Cooper, director of IC Roofing for 15 years, had respected and liked Mr Hoofe and intended him no harm.
The worry of the court case against him had hung over his and his family’s heads during the lengthy police and Health and Safety Executive investigation preceding the trial.
Mr Body said in 2005 the company director had taken health and safety seriously and had a genuine interest in it, giving employees an ‘open licence’ to hire any additional safety equipment needed.
Mr Body said Cooper had become ‘paranoid’ about health and safety after Mr Hoofe’s death and his firm was now one of the safest in the area - and the only one to produce its own safety nets.
In the 15 years he had run IC Roofing, there had been just one other accident, when an employee had fallen through a skylight.
However, the judge said this was more due to good fortune than good management and reiterated that in November 2005 Cooper had ‘wholly and disastrously failed’ to follow health and safety guidance.
Cooper was sentenced to 12 months in prison and disqualified from acting as the director of a company for three years.
His company was fined £10,000 and ordered to pay £20,000 in costs.
His defence lawyer had earlier said a jail sentence would mean the end of IC Roofing, which employs eight people.
