Construction death inquest

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David Olusegun Ojewumi, aged 38, a Nigerian living in South London, was known as Sam. He fell to his death on 23rd May 2003, working on former council housing in Bethnal Green. No one saw how it happened.

Sam was finishing off some rendering on the inside of a parapet wall of a roof garden. The scaffolding was four lifts high. The bottom ladder was put away at night. On the day Sam fell there was a ladder on the first lift, lying covered in materials (noted as needing action at an inspection the previous day), but no ladder from the ground to the first lift.

It was thought that to get to the roof garden he went up using the stairs inside the building then out onto an unprotected canopy, then over the balcony, and that this was the way he was going back to get more render when he fell. Trevor Lloyd Warmington of Procontract Services Ltd, the director of the small firm he was directly employed by, must have missed the fall by minutes.

The HSE said they were satisfied there was a safe system in place for access/egress just that 'for some reason' it was not used on this occasion.

The principal contractor was Apollo London Ltd, which was the only party at the inquest represented by a solicitor. HSE verified all their paperwork was in order and Apollo had a signed bit of paper on file saying Sam had been given an induction. No evidence was given about the adequacy or appropriateness of this induction for someone whose first language was not English. Sam was described as a labourer, although the Coroner impressed on the jury that he was much more skilled than that and was a 'concrete fixer'. There was no mention of a Construction Safety Certificate Scheme card.

The client was Tower Hamlets Community Housing set up in 1999 to enable the privatisation of 1552 homes. Subsequently the government provided £21 million from the Estate Renewal Challenge fund towards a £56 million estate regeneration programme. This is funding local authorities could not access for council housing improvements while they remained the landlord. Consequently they cannot and do not use their own highly skilled and invariably unionised workforce for such projects, assuming that they have not been privatised as well. However the question should be asked - if this work had been done by a local authority's DLO of unionised workers, would a labourer have been allowed to work up there in such a manner by themselves? There was no evidence of a union on the job.

If a construction roving safety rep existed, and they were able to investigate immediately, collecting evidence, would there be a different more complete story of David Ojewumi's death to tell? Evidently there were a lot of workers on the job that day, relatively speaking, but no one saw anything.

Verdict: misadventure

Recent London workplace deaths

20.7.04 Bill Faust, 36, and Adam Meere, 27, firefighters killed on a fire call in Bethnal Green. 4.7.04 Issiaka Salawu, 24, a student working as security, stabbed outside nightclub. 29.6.04 Tony Martin, 72, died in a fire at his vehicle repair garage in Teddington. 1.6.04 Sam Boothman, 32, crushed by a vehicle at World's End Waste, Battersea. 18.5.04 Robert Cherry, 59, crushed between two buses at Uxbridge bus depot. Employed by First Busses. 6.5.04 John Walsh, 40, hit on head on Mount Anvil construction site in Haringey. 25.4.04 Andrew Clack, 59, Electrocuted while attempting to assist children playing on a train at Stratford. 22.4.04, Gary Wells, 47, police officer on a training course, collapsed while doing a type of fitness test. 2.3.04 Keith Webb, drowned while working on a barge at the Tate and Lyle factory in Silvertown. 15.1.04 Patrick O'Sullivan, 54, hit by falling scaffold at the Wembley stadium construction site.

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