Incident
On 22 December 2020, a 64-year-old employee of transport company Nippon Express (UK) Ltd suffered life-changing injuries when a crate weighing approximately 1.2 tonnes, containing an electron microscope, fell from a forklift truck at the Smith & Nephew Medical Ltd site in Hull, United Kingdom. Due to COVID-19 restrictions at the time, Smith & Nephew Medical had taken on responsibility for unloading the delivery itself, rather than leaving this to the regular carrier – a temporary change to normal practice that, as later became clear, was not accompanied by equally careful preparation.
Findings
The HSE investigation found the unloading operation to be poorly organised: there was no adequate planning, risk assessment or supervision. The worker was positioned unsafely and the load was lifted incorrectly, causing the crate to fall on him. HSE found that Smith & Nephew Medical had failed to adequately plan the unloading operation, assess the suitability of the two-tonne-capacity forklift for the nature of the load, consider the execution method, personnel involved and necessary precautions, and provide meaningful supervision of the operation. This accumulation of shortcomings suggests the temporary takeover of unloading work was not treated as a distinct, higher-risk task requiring its own assessment, but rather as a routine extension of day-to-day operations. On 14 September 2026, Hull Crown Court found the company guilty of breaching Section 3(1) of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 – the provision requiring employers to also safeguard the safety of non-employees on their site – imposing a £230,000 fine plus £111,000 in costs.
Recommendations
HSE Inspector David Stewart stated that the case “should serve as a reminder to the wider industry of the need to properly plan and supervise unloading operations, particularly where non-standard loads are involved.” For EHS professionals worldwide, this case underlines the importance of a formal risk assessment whenever normal working practice is deviated from – in this case, temporarily taking on loading/unloading work in-house due to pandemic measures – and of explicitly checking whether the lifting equipment used is suitable for the specific load, regardless of the country in which such work takes place. Temporary or forced changes to established logistics processes, such as those triggered here by pandemic measures, deserve just as thorough a risk assessment as a permanent working method.
Source: Crate falls from forklift truck and seriously injures worker, 15 September 2026
