Fines not enough for young worker's death

Two firms were fined after admitting charges relating to safety failures that lead to the death of 22 year old Michael Mungovan while he was working on the railway outside Vauxhall Station in 2000. Balfour Beatty were fined £150,000, with £18,144 costs and employment agency McGinley Recruitment Services were fined £175,000 with £24,000 costs.

Danny Mungovan, Michael's father, said: ""If you take Balfour Beatty, they made, in the first six months of this year, £62million profit. This is going to keep going until you put people in the dock. It's people that killed Michael, not companies. Fines are pieces of paper. They can be paid."

Michael was a student at Brunel University at the time of his death. Students there had found a way of supplementing their studies by working on the railways at night over the weekends through employment agency McGinley's.

Questions had already been raised about the level of training given to these students before they were sent out to work in a very dangerous environment. At the court the judge criticised the "sloppy" working practices that lead to Michael's death. It was revealed Michael's Personal Track Safety certificate was invalid and he had almost no experience working on a busy live track. Added to this was the fact that the only person with him at the scene of the accident had recently been suspended and was not qualified to supervise the inexperienced student

Prosecuting for the Health and Safety Executive, Richard Beynon QC said: "Neither of these men was sufficiently skilled or experienced to be given such a role. Sending both out without supervision was, in our submission, inherently dangerous."

Also neither of the two firms had ways to check the qualifications of the track gang, while the acting team leader was "utterly unaware" of his safety duties.

One worrying legal aspect of this case is the fact that neither Balfour Beatty nor McGinley's was fined for actually being Michael's employer. Initially charges under Section 2 and Section 3 of the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 were laid against both firms. S2 relates to the duties of an employer to their employees and S3 to the duties of employers to non-employees. This combination of charges arose from the legal confusion surrounding employment agency work, with the question "who is the actual employer" not being settled. Eventually HSE got agreement that both firms to plead guilty to S3 charges with neither admitting they were the employer. This secured a guilty plea and a fine for HSE but doesn't help clarify the issue for future cases. Campaigners are calling for the end employer to be regarded as the employer in all such cases.