A Tenby hotelier has been fined £2,000 after a guest plummeted from a hotel window.
The fine was handed out to Malcolm Thomas, director of the Belgrave Hotel Tenby Limited, by magistrates sitting in Haverfordwest last week.
Mr. Thomas had pleaded guilty to a charge brought under Section 37 of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974, after the company had failed to conduct its undertaking in such a way as to ensure, so far as reasonably practicable, that persons not in its employment were not exposed to risks to their health or safety, as generally required by Section 3(1) of the Act.
The prosecution case, brought by a health and safety inspector employed by Pembrokeshire County Council, followed an incident in October 2005, where a hotel guest sustained serious personal injuries after falling from a top floor window at the hotel, onto a flat roof below.
The incident only came to the attention of the council some nine months after the event, as the result of a civil action brought by the victim.
The subsequent investigation established that the guest had fallen through a large sliding sash window, in one of the top floor bedrooms, which had no means of restricting its opening to a safe level.
Worryingly, these circumstances were found to exist despite the incident and despite a letter to the business following an inspection carried out by the council in March 2005, which specifically highlighted the danger and the need for these arrangements to be risk assessed with a view to appropriate safeguards being implemented.
The court fined Mr. Thomas £2,000 for the offence and awarded the council full costs of £1,999.25.
Afterwards, a spokesperson for the council stated: "Falls from height are the most common cause of health and safety fatalities.
"The injuries sustained in this case were both serious and extensive, and the fall might easily have resulted in fatality.
"The case for prosecution was made all the more compelling, due to the fact that the business had failed to take account of written advice provided following a health and safety inspection carried out by the authority only seven months earlier, regarding the risk posed by the windows, and moreover had still not addressed the point when health and safety inspectors returned to the premises nine months after the incident.
"Within days of the investigation being commenced, cheap and simple adaptations were made to the windows presenting greatest risk (i.e. by fixing wooden blocks within the window sash boxes), to restrict the size of the opening.
"If such action had been taken following the earlier inspection, the incident would have been avoided."