UK Construction and Law
400,000 pound fine after a site operative was crushed between a moving shredder and a gate post
By Staff Writer | 23 August 2026
A 22 year old woman suffered life changing injuries at a Basildon waste site when she was struck by a mobile shredder while walking into the tipping yard. The investigation found that pedestrians walking close to moving plant had become custom and practice, and the company was fined 400,000 pounds at Chelmsford Magistrates' Court on 13 August.
Clearaway Recycling Limited, of Archers Fields, Basildon, pleaded guilty to breaching section 2(1) of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974. It was fined 400,000 pounds and ordered to pay costs of 10,259 pounds. The sentence was published by the Health and Safety Executive on 18 August.
The incident happened on 28 October 2023. A 22 year old site operative was accessing the tipping yard when she was struck by the moving shredder and trapped between the machine and a gate post. She was left with life changing injuries.
Custom and practice as a finding of fact
The investigation concluded that the company had not managed the movement of pedestrians and vehicles at the site. The way that conclusion is expressed in the published findings is worth quoting in full at a site induction: it had become custom and practice for pedestrians to walk in areas close to moving vehicles, including the shredder, as well as close to lorries and forklift trucks.
That is a description of a system that worked until the day it did not. Nobody had to instruct anyone to walk in front of a shredder. The route was simply the route people used, and the yard had been laid out in a way that let it become one.
Where pedestrians require access to working areas, safeguards must be in place to protect them, including providing adequate segregation or separation distances between pedestrians and vehicles in the area.
Joanne Williams, inspector at the Health and Safety Executive
The regulator put the sector in context. Six workers were killed in waste and recycling during 2025 and 2026, and measured over five years that makes a fatality ten times as likely in the sector as across all industry.
One of the reasons is the risks from vehicle and pedestrian collisions are well known, yet serious incidents continue to occur.
Joanne Williams, inspector at the Health and Safety Executive
Why this reads across to a construction site
The duty breached is the general one owed to employees under section 2(1), not a sector specific rule, and the hazard is the ordinary hazard of a working yard: large mobile plant, restricted sight lines, a pinch point at a gate, and people on foot who need to get from one part of the site to another.
The sum is the point that will be noticed. A single injury, no fatality, an early guilty plea, and a fine of 400,000 pounds with costs on top.
Three practical checks follow. The first is the pinch point. A gate post beside a route used by tracked or wheeled plant is a place where a person can be trapped rather than pushed clear, and a segregation scheme that works along an open haul route can be worthless at the gate.
The second is the gap between the traffic management plan and the desire line. Custom and practice is what happens when the drawn pedestrian route is longer, wetter or less convenient than the one across the yard. A plan that is not walked at different times of day, by someone who will say so when the barriers have been moved, is a document rather than a control.
The third is the machine that moves occasionally. A shredder is not thought of as a vehicle by the people working around it, and a plant movement that happens twice a shift is easier to forget than a lorry route that runs all day. The findings put the shredder in the same sentence as the lorries and the forklift trucks, which is where it belongs on a traffic management drawing as well.
The woman injured was 22 and had been on site as an operative. Nothing in the published account suggests she did anything other than walk where people walked.