Council Fined After Faulty Ladders Left Accessible to Employees

Wirral Council has been fined £6,000, with £4,000 in costs, after an employee fell from a collapsing stepladder and suffered a fractured collarbone and broken ribs. The HSE’s investigation found the Council had identified ladders that were unsafe and in poor repair — and then left them accessible to any employee who wanted to use them. That single detail is what lifts this case above a routine prosecution. This was not a hazard nobody had spotted. It was a hazard that had been spotted, recorded, and left in place.

The Key Takeaways

• Wirral Council was fined £6,000 plus £4,000 costs after an employee fell from a stepladder while accessing a loft space, suffering a fractured collarbone and broken ribs.
• The HSE found the Council had identified unsafe, poorly maintained ladders but left them accessible to staff.
• Employees had not been trained to assess whether a ladder was safe to use before climbing it.
• The Council pleaded guilty to breaching Section 2(1) of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 — its general duty to protect employees.
• The failures here were about management, not equipment cost: inspection, training and removal of known-defective kit are low-cost, high-impact controls.

What Happened at Wirral Council?

The facts are simple, and that is part of what makes them uncomfortable. An employee at the Council-operated Dale Farm site in Heswall was accessing a loft space using a stepladder. As he neared the top, the ladder gave way beneath him and he fell to the ground, fracturing his collarbone and breaking ribs.

The HSE’s investigation concluded that Wirral Council had failed to adequately control the risks of working at height and using ladders. Ladder use was not effectively managed. Crucially, the Council had already identified ladders that were not in a good state of repair and unsafe to use — yet those ladders stayed exactly where they were, available to anyone who reached for them. On top of that, employees had received no training in how to check whether a ladder was safe before trusting their weight to it.

The Council pleaded guilty to breaching Section 2(1) of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974, the foundational duty on every employer to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the health, safety and welfare of its workers. As HSE Inspector Mike Lisle put it, the injuries were painful, life-changing, and entirely preventable.

Why Is ‘Known but Not Removed’ the Real Failure Here?

Because it turns a lapse into a decision. There is a meaningful difference between a hazard you never identified and a hazard you identified and then walked past. The first is a gap in your monitoring; the second is a gap in your follow-through — and the courts, quite rightly, take a dim view of the latter.

In nearly four decades in this profession, I have seen this pattern more times than I would like. An inspection flags a defect. The defect gets written down. And then the loop never closes — the item is not quarantined, not repaired, not thrown away. The paperwork exists, which can create a false sense that the risk has been managed, when in reality the dangerous kit is still sitting in the cupboard waiting for someone to grab it in a hurry. Identifying a hazard is not controlling it. Control only happens when the defective ladder physically cannot be used.

How Common Is Falling from Height

It remains the single biggest killer in British workplaces. Falls from height are consistently the leading cause of fatal injury to workers in Great Britain, accounting for a substantial share of workplace deaths year after year, according to HSE statistics. And ladders sit right at the heart of that picture — not because ladders are inherently dangerous, but because they are so ordinary that the risk is easy to underestimate.

That familiarity is the trap. A ladder does not look like a hazardous piece of work equipment. It looks like something you keep in the garage. But the Work at Height Regulations 2005 make no exception for the everyday — they apply to any work where a person could fall a distance liable to cause injury, and they place a clear hierarchy on how you manage it: avoid working at height where you can, prevent falls where you cannot avoid the work, and minimise the consequences where a residual risk remains.

What Should Duty-Holders Take from This Case?

You do not need scaffolding and a rescue plan to learn from this prosecution. The controls that would have prevented it are among the most basic and affordable in our discipline. If you have access equipment on your premises, this is a prompt to check four things:

• Inspection: Are your ladders and stepladders formally inspected on a schedule, with a simple pre-use check by the person about to climb?
• Removal: When a defect is found, is the item immediately taken out of service and physically prevented from being used — not just noted on a form?
• Training: Do your people actually know how to assess a ladder before they climb it, or are you assuming competence you have never provided?
• Suitability: Is a ladder even the right tool for the task, or has it become the default simply because it is what is to hand?

Notice that none of these cost much. The gap in the Wirral case was not a budget gap — it was a management gap. The fine may be modest, but the injuries were not, and the reputational weight of a public-body prosecution lands far harder than £10,000 suggests.

What Can You Do This Week?

A short, honest audit is worth more than a long policy nobody reads. This week:

• Walk to where your ladders are stored and physically inspect them — not the records, the ladders.
• Confirm there is a clear, understood route for taking defective equipment out of use, and that it actually gets used.
• Ask a few of your team how they would decide whether a ladder is safe to climb. Their answers will tell you whether training has landed.
• Revisit any work at height activity you have quietly filed as ‘low risk’ because it involves nothing more than a stepladder.

The message from this case is one our profession has repeated for a generation: the routine tasks hurt people just as badly as the dramatic ones. A loft hatch and a stepladder cost this worker a fractured collarbone and broken ribs. The controls that would have prevented it were sitting within easy reach — just like the faulty ladder was.

Frequently Asked Questions

What law did Wirral Council breach?

Wirral Council pleaded guilty to breaching Section 2(1) of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974. This is the general duty on employers to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the health, safety and welfare at work of their employees. It was fined £6,000 with £4,000 in costs.

What are the main duties for working at height in the UK?

Work at height is governed by the Work at Height Regulations 2005. Duty-holders must avoid work at height where reasonably practicable, use suitable equipment to prevent falls where the work cannot be avoided, and minimise the distance and consequences of a fall where residual risk remains. Equipment must be suitable, maintained and inspected, and workers must be competent.

Are ladders banned for use at work?

No. Ladders and stepladders are not banned and remain legal for many tasks. They should be used for low-risk, short-duration work where a risk assessment shows they are suitable. They must be in good condition, inspected, and used by people who know how to check and use them safely.

How should defective ladders be managed?

A ladder found to be defective should be taken out of use immediately and physically prevented from being used again until it is repaired or replaced. Recording the defect is not enough on its own — as this case shows, a known-unsafe ladder that remains accessible is a live risk, not a controlled one.

Work at height prosecutions, and the practical lessons behind them, are exactly the kind of story we track in our This Week in Health and Safety series. For a regular round-up of the changes and cases that matter to practitioners, sign up to the Astutis Quarterly Newsletter.