When the potential for a serious accident means training your young staff is essential
What happened?
A seventeen year-old boy was working at a very well-known fast food chain. Road signs for the restaurant’s drive-through and car park entrances were unclear, so he was asked by his manager to go outside and direct customers.
While he was doing so, a motorist became ‘aggressive’ and drove into the boy, fracturing his knee. The boy said, ‘this accident has really stopped me from doing all the things, physically, that I wanted to do growing up. I will have to live with this for the rest of my life.’
The local authority investigated and decided to prosecute the fast food chain (the restaurant was fully owned, not franchised).
Legal Outcome
The prosecuting lawyer said, ‘at no stage had the company contemplated that employees may have been at risk from either an accidental or deliberate collision.’
The court was also told that less than a year before the boy’s accident, two other workers had sustained minor injuries while directing traffic outside the same restaurant.
The fast food chain pleaded guilty to two breaches of health and safety regulations including a failure to train staff, were fined £200,000 and ordered to pay £26,343 in costs.
What can we learn from what happened?
The two main elements of this case study are the nature of the accident (vehicle related), and the age of the boy (seventeen).
Accidents involving workplace transport are the second biggest cause of fatalities in the UK. I am not sure whether the HSE would have categorised this accident as workplace transport, given the vehicle being driven was not a working vehicle, but that doesn’t matter. What is important is the recognition that any moving vehicle is a potential hazard, and the vehicle doesn’t have to be that big or the speed that high for serious damage to be done.
To expose any employee to the risks associated with moving vehicles means they have to be very well trained and managed. In this case, the employee received no training and was clearly under-managed. The need for this training ramps up because he would be classified in law as a ‘young person’, which means that the level of risk is likely to be higher because of the person’s age and inexperience. It is also foreseeable that in a poorly signed car park, full of hungry drivers and even hungrier children, there is the potential for aggression.
Put all these together and to expose a teenager to these risks was clearly wrong.
Source of Information
SHP In-Court