TfL & Balfour Beatty fined over £400,000

London UK, January 2018. Tottenham Court Road Underground Station, London.

Balfour Beatty and TfL have been fined over £400,000 by a rail regulator.

The London Underground was fined £100,000 and Balfour Beatty was fined £333,000 for breaking health and safety laws that led to worker Adrian Rascarache being hit by rail vehicle in 2016 and acquiring serious injuries.

“Today’s sentences send a clear message that the health and safety of workers must not be compromised. In this instance, corners were cut as a response to perceived time pressure. This is unacceptable and resulted in the terrible injuries suffered by Mr Rascarache,” said  Ian Prosser, the HM chief inspector of railways.

“The safety of workers is an absolute priority for the ORR and we will take appropriate action against organisations or individuals when failings are found.”

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Caroline Sheridan, who is the director of renewals and enhancements for London Underground said: “We offer our sincere apologies to Mr Rascarache and we deeply regret the serious injuries he sustained. TfL staff and contractors undertake some incredibly complex work across our network every day and their safety is always paramount. We take any incident on our network extremely seriously and we continue to work with all our contractors to ensure that our high standards of safety are maintained so that such a terrible incident does not happen again.”

Balfour Beatty was fined £500,000 earlier this year after an HSE investigation that found the failure to control exposure to hand-arm vibration.

Shares in the group (LON: BBY) are trading down 1.31% at 247,70 (1355GMT).