Mr T was employed as security guard when he was instructed to move heavy sandbags in the course of his duties. He hadn’t been provided with any manual handling training, and as a result of both the lack of training and the nature of the task he was instructed to carry out, he suffered a back injury.
This ended up being quite a complex case due to more than one company being pursued, and due to the fact the opponents were disputing responsibility.
As an employer’s liability claim we initially pursued the security company although it transpired he was being contracted from an agency to them. Ultimately the responsibility for manual handling training, as well as adhering to The Manual Handling Operations Regulations, falls on the employer – so we initiated contact with them as opposed to the security company or the establishment.
It took some time for a response and we almost had to initiate early court action to force them to respond, but they eventually disputed liability citing that the establishment should be responsible as the owners of the sandbags and the company that instructed the task to be carried out (allegedly).
The entertainments venue denied responsibility on the grounds of what I mentioned earlier about the ultimate duty being on the employer. We issued court proceedings since no one was prepared to accept blame at this stage in the case, and we had already obtained some vital medical evidence to support the case as well.
So we were in the position of pursuing three different companies – the agency our client was actually an employee of; the security company that had the contract between the agency and our client and were contracted to provide security services to the establishment; and the establishment itself.
It can easily get very messy in these kind of situations which is why it’s so important to have a quality lawyer like us representing you for the claim. All three of them were denying they were to blame.
I won’t bore you with all of the litigation side of things – but now court proceedings had been issued we prepared the case and formally served all our evidence and case information on to the solicitors for each of the three potential Defendants. After exchanges of evidence and information we decided to put them all at risk with an offer to settle the claim which would be split between two of them.
Given the circumstances there could clearly be blame on one or all of the parties involved. The employer is duty bound by the legislation to provide training and risk assess manual handling activities. The fact that both the security company and the actual agency that employed him could equally share responsibility for this meant that we could propose both of them pay a share of the compensation to our client.
With an approved order from the court, the agency paid 40% of the compensation and the remaining 60% was met by the security company. Mr T received his full award of £7,500 in a case where it was clear from an early stage that all three of the potential Defendants involved would be batting liability between them.
