Ringway wins appeal against HSE risk assessment notice

Ringway has successfully applied to a tribunal to cancel a health and safety improvement notice served against it. 

Ringway Infrastructure Services Ltd was handed an improvement notice and a notice of contravention in July 2021 after one of its employees died while carrying out emergency road maintenance works in Hertfordshire. 

The tribunal heard that employee Michael Bennett and his colleague had parked on the side of a dual carriageway in Waltham Cross as they sought to address a hazardous branch overhang. Bennett was fatally injured after a drug-driver oversteered to avoid the maintenance van, lost control, and rebounded from the central reservation. 

The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) alleged that Ringway broke the law by failing to ensure that a proper risk assessment for the work had been carried out, suggesting that the relative assessment had not taken into account the road speed and type. 

However, Ringway appealed the decision, saying its risk assessment processes were suitable. The company also said the improvement noticed failed to properly account for the nature of dynamic risk assessing. 

After a seven-day tribunal hearing that considered more than 1,000 pages of evidence, as well as dash cam evidence from the fatal accident, employment judge Kathryn Ramsden agreed with Ringway and cancelled the notice. 

Ramsden found that the HSE “has not put a case to us that the supervision or monitoring of the emergency standby (ESB) crews was deficient or meant that Regulation 3(1) [of The Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999] was breached”.

She said that the generic risk assessment for ESB crews, together with the staffing and tasking decisions made by a supervisor, were “suitable and sufficient”. 

She added that any failures with the dynamic risk assessment could not be considered a breach of the relevant health and safety law, as the law concerns the duty of an employer to protect their staff with risk assessment.  

“We consider that [a company] cannot delegate that responsibility to the very employees to whom the duty is owed, or this would nullify the protection Regulation 3(1)[[[of The Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999] affords them,” she said. 

In a separate court case, the driver of the vehicle that killed Bennett was given a custodial sentence after being found to be driving without an appropriate licence or insurance, and having consumed cocaine, cannabis and diazepam.