Local authority to pay out nearly £40k over swing safety failures

A local authority has been ordered to pay nearly £40,000 in fines and costs after a ten-year-old boy sustained severe head injuries when part of a swing collapsed on him in a park.

The Health and Safety Executive prosecuted Blackpool Council - which had been warned by a safety engineer more than a year before that the swing needed urgent attention - over the incident.

The boy and his friends had been playing on a tyre swing at Claremont Park in Blackpool on 6 June 2011.

The swing was connected to an arched metal beam overhead by four changes which hung down from a suspension mechanism.

The ten year old was under the swing when the rotating mechanism gave way and struck him on the head. The boy suffered a crushed and fractured skull and lost the vision in his right eye. He was in hospital for eight days.

The council had arranged for the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents to carry out quarterly inspections of its playground equipment.

A ROSPA engineer first alerted Blackpool that the swing needed “urgent attention” in March 2010 as the suspension mechanism was not rotating properly. The engineer recommended that the council contact the manufacturer for further advice.

A court heard that three subsequent inspection reports repeated the warnings but the council did not act on them.

An investigation by the HSE concluded that poor repair work carried out on the swing in 2009 was likely to have contributed to its deterioration, meaning the same issue was unlikely to occur on other similar swings.

Blackpool Council was fined £18,000 and ordered to pay prosecution costs of £20,000 after pleading guilty to a breach of the Health and Safety at Work etc Act 1974 on 23 October 2013.

HSE Inspector Michael Mullen said: “A ten-year-old boy suffered a potentially life-threatening head injury when playing at a local park because Blackpool Council failed to act on information generated by its own health and safety management system.

“The council first received written advice from the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents in March 2010 that the swing needed urgent attention. That advice couldn’t have been clearer, and was repeated in several quarterly reports, but the council failed to do anything about it.”

Mullen said the HSE was satisfied that the swing was entirely safe when it was first installed in the park, but the council allowed its condition to deteriorate following a poor repair in 2009.

He added: “There was simply no point in the council paying for a specialist engineer to inspect its playground equipment if it wasn’t going to act on the advice. If the swing had received urgent attention, as recommended, then the horrific injuries the boy suffered could have been avoided.”