Jerram Falkus £40k safety fine: work-at-height lessons for project teams
Reviewed by Joe Ashwell
First reported on The Construction Index
30 Second Briefing
A 19-year-old labourer, Renols Lleshi, died after stepping onto a ventilation shaft on the 12th-floor roof garden at the Ark Soane Academy residential block in Mill Hill Road, London W3, where the opening was covered only with plasterboard and roofing foam before he fell six floors. Jerram Falkus Construction Limited admitted breaching Regulation 4(1) of the Work at Height Regulations 2005 and was fined £42,200, plus a £2,000 surcharge and £5,000 costs at City of London Magistrates Court. HSE found routine site inspections excluded the roof garden, so the fragile, non-loadbearing cover and fall hazard were never identified or controlled.
Technical Brief
- Ventilation shaft opening was temporarily infilled only with a single plasterboard sheet plus roofing foam.
- HSE investigation focused on the shaft’s fragile, non-loadbearing cover as the immediate failure mechanism.
- Inspectors identified that formal site inspection routes omitted the roof garden work area.
- Absence of physical barriers, edge protection or warning signage around the shaft left no visual risk cues.
- Regulation 4(1) of the Work at Height Regulations 2005 was breached by inadequate planning and control measures.
- HSE guidance requires work-at-height access routes to be planned so fragile surfaces are either avoided or fully decked.
- Effective remediation on comparable sites would include robust covers rated for imposed loads, plus tagged inspection records.
- For multi-storey residential builds, integrating roof zones into daily supervisor walkdowns is a critical monitoring control.
Our Take
Breaches of Regulation 4(1) of the Work at Height Regulations 2005, as cited here against Jerram Falkus Construction Limited, typically trigger wider reviews of method statements and subcontractor oversight on multi-storey schemes, so contractors on comparable London W3 education builds can expect closer scrutiny of scaffold dismantling sequences and edge protection sign-off.
The involvement of City of London Magistrates’ Court in this fatality case signals that even mid-tier contractors such as Jerram Falkus are now featuring in our Safety-tagged coverage alongside major nationals, which is likely to push smaller firms to formalise safety management systems to a standard previously associated mainly with Tier 1 operators.
Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.
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