Key facts
- Property developer St James Group Ltd was fined £1m and facade contractor Lindner Prater £300,000.
- Both firms were ordered to pay £125,000 each in costs.
- Mick Ferris, 53, was killed on October 2, 2018, when a 130kg window pane fell 26 storeys from the Corniche development in Vauxhall, London.
- The firms were found guilty of ignoring foreseeable risks and failing to discharge a duty under the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974.
- A similar window pane had fallen from the same development in August 2017, but the design had not significantly changed.
Two companies have been fined a total of £1.3 million over health and safety breaches after a coach driver was killed by a falling window pane from a luxury London development. St James Group Ltd was fined £1m and specialist facade contractor Lindner Prater £300,000 at Inner London crown court on Thursday. Both firms were also ordered to pay £125,000 each in costs. Mick Ferris, 53, was crushed when a window pane, weighing 130kg, fell 26 storeys from the Corniche development in Vauxhall on October 2, 2018. The court heard that a similar window had fallen from the same building in August 2017, but the design had not subsequently changed significantly. The design featured a single metal restrictor, which the court heard could be prised off by the wind. Mr Justice Boyle stated he was not sentencing the firms on the basis of the design itself being unsafe, as such designs were common within the industry and not prohibited by HSE guidance. However, he said St James should have been more robust in ensuring the critical safety component was present and engaged. Ferris's widow, Rachel, said his death "could have been prevented" and that "one person could have asked: ‘Can’t we do this better?’ What those companies did killed my husband." HSE principal inspector James Goldfinch described the second window fall as "simply criminal" and noted that lessons had not been learned from the previous near-miss.