What happened
According to the HSE Media Centre, a 24-year-old bricklayer was part of a team repairing a barn roof at East Fleetham Farm in Seahouses, Northumberland, on 5 February 2025. He stepped on a polycarbonate roof sheet and fell approximately eight feet to the concrete floor below.
His injuries were serious: two broken vertebrae, a fractured sternum, and surgery. The HSE investigation found the company — Len Smith & Son Building Contractors Limited — had failed to ensure adequate measures were in place to protect workers at height. Crucially, the source states there was no risk assessment or safe system of work for the activity being undertaken.
The company pleaded guilty to breaching Sections 2(1) and 3(1) of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 and was fined £20,000 plus £5,744 in costs at North Tyneside Magistrates Court on 6 August 2026.
HSE inspector Richard McMullen said: "The outcome of this case could have been much worse, but the man's injuries were still very serious." He added that falls from height "continue to be the leading cause of workplace fatalities in Great Britain, with 31 people losing their lives in the past year."
Why it matters to contractors
This is a farm roof, not a high-rise. That's exactly the point. Fragile-roof work is one of the most under-planned jobs in the trade because it looks routine — a bit of patching, a couple of hours, no scaffold. But polycarbonate sheets, rooflights, asbestos-cement panels and worn corrugated sheeting will not take a person's weight, and there's often no way to tell which sheet is sound just by looking.
The HSE didn't prosecute over the fall alone. It prosecuted because there was no risk assessment and no safe system of work. That's a paperwork failure with a physical consequence. The regulator's message, in McMullen's words, is blunt: "We will prosecute those that fail to protect people while at work." Falls from height accounted for over a quarter of all work-related deaths in 2025/26, and construction remains the sector with the most worker fatalities.
What to check on your site
- Assume every roof is fragile until proven otherwise. Rooflights and older sheeting are the usual killers. Never walk directly on a sheet unless it's been confirmed load-bearing.
- Have a written, task-specific risk assessment for the actual roof and the actual job — not a generic "working at height" sheet.
- Plan the access and edge protection before anyone goes up: crawl boards, staging, MEWPs, or working from below where possible.
- Provide fall arrest or fall prevention where a fall through or off cannot be eliminated, and check anchor points.
- Brief the crew and record it. A five-minute toolbox talk on fragile surfaces before the shift is cheap insurance.
- Confirm competence. HSE guidance says work at height must be properly planned, supervised and carried out by competent people.
- Keep the paperwork on site so it's demonstrable, not just in a folder back at the office.
Which SafetyPod documents help
If your at-height paperwork is thin, start with the Roofer Risk Assessment Pack — it covers working at height, fragile roofs, access equipment and roof monitoring in one place. For the method side of high-risk work, the RAMS & Permits templates give you editable method statements to set out a safe system of work. And a briefing from the Toolbox Talks library gets the crew aligned before the first sheet is touched, with an attendance record to prove it happened.
Not sure what you actually need? The free H&S Document Checker points you to the right documents for your trade.
These templates are drafted to current UK legislation and are fully editable — but they only protect people when they're read, tailored to the real job, and followed on the day. No document makes anyone compliant on its own; the work does.
Take five minutes now
Before your next roof job, ask one question: is there a written risk assessment and safe system of work for this specific roof? If the answer is no, sort it before anyone climbs. Browse the Roofer Pack and get your at-height paperwork in order.