Sixteen-year-old Bury Apprentice Dies!

Greater Manchester Hazards Centre,
Windrush Millennium Centre,
70 Alexandra Road,
Manchester M16 7WD
Also Hazards Campaign Secretariat
and Families Against Corporate Killers:
mail@gmhazards.org.uk 
0161 636 7557

Greater Manchester Hazards Centre and Families Against Corporate Killers Statement

on the death of Cameron Minshull, 16, at an engineering company in Bury Thursday 10th January 2013

WE are so very sad for Cameron Minshull, who was only 16 years old when he was killed at an engineering company in Bury, where he had worked as an apprentice for only a matter of weeks. We would like to send our condolences to his family who are naturally devastated.

When anyone goes to work they should be safe from both immediate threat to life and to long term health, and we expect inexperienced apprentices and young workers to be protected by extra measures of supervision and care, as the law requires. We do not expect to send out child to work, to be a ‘striver;’ not a ‘skiver’, and for them to be killed at work and never come home. Until there has been a full investigation we do not know if this was a rare accident, something unforeseeable and unpreventable, or whether, like the over 80% of workplace deaths and injuries, it was due to a failure to manage health and safety properly.

Daily we are fed a press and media diet that health and safety at work is excessive, ‘gorn mad’ and echoing the government’s accusation that good health and safety is a ’burden on business’. It is false and it should concern us all. Every worker should be safe at work and come home alive and well, and especially our children who are young and inexperienced and need greater protection. But the government’s attacks on our hard won health and safety laws and their enforcement, which are intended to keep us safe, and the daily rubbishing of the value of health and safety, is in fact putting us all at much greater risk.
The Prime Minister spoke this year at the Media Factory 'enterprise hub' at the University of Central Lancashire in Preston and cited health and safety regulations as one of the reasons behind a lower number of companies offering work experience placements, and told the audience this was “very, very bad news”. He said: “We need to encourage businesses to offer that work experience, we need to simplify health and safety rules, we need to say to schools, ‘every school should have a plan for how you are going to teach children about enterprise and business’.”

We suggest that before the Prime Minister mistakenly labels health and safety rules too burdensome, he looks at the facts: over the last decade, at least 5 under 19s have been killed each year and up to 5,000 seriously injured at work. This is not due to too much, but too little health and safety. I would ask him whether he would send his own children to work in workplaces which his government has now falsely classified as ‘low risk’ such as manufacturing and engineering, and exempted them from preventative inspections, and especially those which are following his explicit advice, to treat H&S less seriously and not to bother about “dotting all the i’s and crossing the t’s”.

The truth is that good health and safety saves lives and money for employers while bad health and safety is a terrible burden on those killed or injured and made ill, and on their families. We must stop the government rolling back the laws and enforcement that prevents our children being killed at work. No-one should die simply for going to work to earn a living, and especially not a 16 year old with his whole life ahead of him. Rest in peace Cameron and much love and sympathy to his family who now have to live without him.

For more information contact Hilda Palmer 0161 636 7557 or 079298 00240 

Hilda Palmer:  Co-ordinator of Greater Manchester Hazards Centre and Facilitator of Families Against Corporate Killers

Deaths on building sites: 'Justice' & a mother's love

Craig Whelan 23 years old (left) & Paul Wakefield (right) killed on 23rd May 2002 in a fire in a chimney at Carnaud Metal Box in Bolton.

By Linda Whelan, mother

I want to tell you how my son Craig died to show you the risks workers face and the injustice families face when someone is killed at work.

Craig worked for a company called Churchill’s Ltd in Nottingham, which won a tender to demolish a chimney at Metal Box (CMB) in Bolton on the basis of cost and not safety. His company offered to do it for £9,000, but other local companies, who had worked on the chimney in the past, were aware of the flammable residue inside the chimney and the dangers of using hot cutting gear and tendered for the demolition on the basis of only doing the work using cold cutting gear and taking the chimney down from the outside.

Because of the amount of equipment needed their prices for the job were between £20,000 and £30,000. Metal Box chose Craig’s company – the cheapest tender, doing the job from the inside using hot cutting gear.

Craig and his work mate Paul Wakefield were the steeplejacks sub contracted to demolish the chimney at Metal Box and they were murdered at work on 23rd May 2002.

Three company representatives issued a hot work permit for Craig and Paul to go inside the chimney and cut it up using hot gear.

These company representatives knew there were dangerous flammable chemicals on the inside of the chimney and that it was recommended to be demolished from the outside using cold cutting gear. They had confirmation of this in an e-mail from the manufacturers of the chemical, but they withheld this information from the contract company Craig worked for and from the two steeplejacks themselves.

When Craig and his colleague carried out the hot cutting work, they were engulfed in a fireball. My son and his colleague were murdered. Craig was 23 years old.

The Crown Prosecution Service prosecuted the three representatives for manslaughter, but due to some poor case preparation, this charge was dropped. The company representatives then pleaded guilty to a lesser offence of breaching Health and Safety Legislation on all the same counts for which they had originally been charged with manslaughter. This company is a large profitable organisation, which is being allowed to get away with murdering Craig.

On Wednesday 12th June 2004 the three men were convicted under the Health and Safety at Work Act on all counts, which they had originally been charged with, for manslaughter. They pleaded guilty to knowing the content of the chimney were unsafe and failing to pass the information on regarding the e-mail they received to either the company, Craig or Paul and to sending the two men back into the chimney and therefore to their deaths. They were fined a few thousand pounds for the lives of two men. In their last statement they said that they said that they had not had sufficient training in Health and Safety. I ask: what training could these men have been given that would have helped them to pass on the information stating ‘WARNING the contents of the chimney is flammable and toxic’?

In all cases of death by industrial incident, individual directors should be prosecuted.

Because of the lack of government intervention to ensure that the law is changed to force employers to be responsible for the health and safety of their employees, my son suffered a horrendous death that could have and should have been prevented.

Because the court case collapsed, my family never got to hear all the details of how Craig and his colleague were killed. We hoped that an inquest would allow us this opportunity. However, the coroner consulted with all the parties involved and decided there was no need for an inquest, rejecting any Human Rights implications. This has left us all devastated and still not sure how and why my son came to die. Appeals to the HSE to put out special warnings to steeple jacks doing this sort of work also came to nothing, but I am going to fight on for other families, so they do not have to go through the heartbreak that me and my sons have suffered.

Linda Whelan, Craig’s mother.