A construction company has been fined more than £40,000 after a 19-year-old worker plunged to his death through an inadequately covered ventilation shaft at a West London building site in what a safety regulator has described as a wholly avoidable tragedy.
Renols Lleshi was working on the 12th floor roof garden of a residential block under construction at the Ark Soane Academy site in Mill Hill Road, Acton, on 5 July 2023, when the covering beneath him gave way. He fell six floors and died at the scene.
An investigation by the Health and Safety Executive found the ventilation shaft had been covered by nothing more than a sheet of plasterboard and roofing foam — materials wholly insufficient to bear a person’s weight. Inspectors also established that routine safety checks of the building had consistently failed to include the roof garden area, meaning the hazard went unidentified and no warning was passed to the scaffolding team Lleshi was part of when he stepped onto the covering.
Jerram Falkus Construction Limited, the firm responsible for the site, pleaded guilty to breaching Regulation 4(1) of the Work at Height Regulations 2005. At City of London Magistrates’ Court on 18 March, the company was handed a £42,200 fine, ordered to pay £5,000 in costs and a £2,000 surcharge.
HSE Inspector Natalie Prince said falls from height remained one of the leading causes of workplace fatalities and serious injuries in the construction industry, and described Lleshi’s death as entirely preventable.
In a statement provided to the HSE, Lleshi’s family said the knowledge that his death could have been avoided had made their grief considerably harder to bear. His father said the family was grateful to the HSE for pursuing the investigation and prosecution, but that nothing could bring their son back or ease their loss.
Jerram Falkus Construction, a family-owned firm that had operated across London and the South East for 140 years, ceased trading last month and entered administration through FRP Advisory.
Falls from height remain the single largest cause of fatal injuries in the British construction industry, according to HSE data, with inadequate risk assessments and insufficient edge and void protection among the most commonly cited failings in fatal incident investigations.
