W G Carter fall death: work-at-height failings and lessons for site engineers
Reviewed by Tom Sullivan
First reported on The Construction Index
30 Second Briefing
W G Carter Limited has been fined £120,000 plus £5,247 costs at Bristol Magistrates Court after 59-year-old worker Richard “Felix” Roper died falling from a stripped first floor onto a concrete ground slab at a barn house in Nether Westcote. A joint HSE and Gloucestershire Police investigation found work at height was not properly planned or supervised, with workers allowed onto joists where floorboards and structural supports had been removed while others continued lifting boards. After a Prohibition Notice, the firm switched to installing replacement joists from below using work-at-height equipment and blocking access to the first floor.
Technical Brief
- Failure mechanism: worker stepped onto exposed first-floor joists where boards and some joists were missing or unsecured.
- Impact was a fall onto a hard concrete ground slab, creating high head-impact energy and fatal trauma.
- Investigators identified concurrent activities – joist replacement and floorboard removal – as a dynamic, escalating fall-from-height hazard.
- Regulation 4(1) of the Work at Height Regulations 2005 was breached, indicating inadequate planning and method selection.
- A Prohibition Notice halted all work at height until engineered fall-prevention measures and safe access arrangements were in place.
- Post-incident remediation method fixed new joists from below using work-at-height equipment, eliminating exposure to open edges above.
- For similar refurbishment projects, segregating trades, sequencing demolition and joist replacement, and physically excluding access to partial floors is critical.
Our Take
The involvement of the Health and Safety Executive in this Nether Westcote fatality aligns with other recent UK cases in our database, where HSE enforcement has increasingly focused on systemic failures to manage work at height rather than one-off errors by individuals.
With construction already highlighted by HSE statistics as having the highest worker fatalities in Britain in 2025/26, a prosecution under Regulation 4(1) of the Work at Height Regulations 2005 is likely to reinforce more stringent scrutiny of small and mid-sized contractors such as W G Carter Limited on site planning and supervision duties.
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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