Tarmac Building Products fine: safeguarding and interlock lessons for engineers
Reviewed by Tom Sullivan
First reported on The Construction Index
30 Second Briefing
Tarmac Building Products has been fined £633,300, plus £5,583 costs and a £2,000 victim surcharge, after an HSE investigation into a 22 July 2022 incident at its Linford, Essex block production line where an employee’s legs were crushed between moving steel frames on a trackway. The interlocked access gate to the fenced frame-cleaning area did not isolate power to preceding track sections, allowing a loaded frame to enter the “safe” zone while manual cleaning was underway. HSE found prior near misses on the same section and a historic risk assessment identifying extra guarding and control measures, which were only implemented after the life-changing injury.
Technical Brief
- Failure mechanism centred on an interlocked access gate that did not de-energise upstream track sections.
- Moving steel frames continued to travel over track axles, progressively pinning the worker towards downstream machinery.
- Emergency stop actuation by a distant colleague was the only effective safeguarding layer preventing further trauma.
- HSE investigation focused on guarding adequacy and functional integrity of interlocks relative to actual access patterns.
- Historic risk assessment had already specified “additional control measures” for this track section but none were implemented pre-incident.
- Multiple prior near misses on the same block line were not fully investigated, weakening behavioural and engineering controls.
- Monitoring and remediation now require systematic near-miss logging, root-cause analysis and verification of interlock isolation logic across all lines.
- Conviction was for breach of Section 2(1) Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974, reinforcing statutory duties on machinery guarding.
Our Take
Among the 608 Infrastructure stories in our database, only a small subset of the 1672 safety‑tagged pieces involve UK manufacturing plants like Tarmac's Linford site, signalling that factory-process safety is a recurring but still less-documented risk area compared with transport and utilities incidents.
The long gap between the July 2022 incident at Linford and the January 2026 sentencing is consistent with other HSE-led prosecutions in our coverage, which often stretch over several years and can complicate how operators sequence plant upgrades or redesigns while legal outcomes are pending.
Cases in our database where workers are unable to return to work for a year or more, as here, tend to trigger not just fines but also extensive re-engineering of material-handling and isolation procedures, so practitioners should expect that similar incidents at UK sites will likely lead to intrusive audits of legacy equipment and controls.
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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