St James Group Lindner Prater Fine totalled £1.3m after Mick Ferris was crushed to death by a 130kg window pane from the Corniche in Vauxhall, London, on 2 October 2018. The sentence at Inner London crown court turned a fatal site failure into a six-figure hit for both firms, with costs added on top.
St James Group Ltd was fined £1m and Lindner Prater £300,000. Ferris, a driver for Clarkes of London, had been returning to his coach when the pane fell 26 storeys from about 90 metres, or 300ft.
Ferris family heard Rachel
Rachel told the court that Ferris’s death could have happened to anybody and could have been prevented. Her statement put the price of the failure in plain terms: a routine working day became a fatal one because no one stopped the sequence that led to the fall.
She said: “If somebody had done something differently – anything – it would have changed our lives. One person could have asked: ‘Can’t we do this better?’ What those companies did killed my husband.”
August 2017 near miss
A window panel had already fallen from the same development in August 2017. James Goldfinch said Ferris “lost his life due to the failings of two leading companies in their field,” and added that the earlier near miss made the later death “all the more galling.”
The design used at the Corniche opened outwards and was held in place by a single metal restrictor, a simple restraint that was supposed to keep the pane from moving too far. The court also heard that the design was common within the industry and that there was no HSE guidance prohibiting its use, yet Mr Justice Boyle said he was not sentencing the firms on the basis that the design itself was unsafe.
Health and Safety Work Act
The firms were found guilty in August of ignoring foreseeable risks and convicted of failing to discharge a duty under the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974. That finding left the court dealing with a narrow but serious question: the design may have been ordinary, but the response after a previous window fall was not.
For Ferris’s family, the sentence closes the legal phase but not the fact pattern that matters most to anyone working around the site: a pane fell once, then fell again, and the second time it killed a man. The unresolved issue is why the warning from August 2017 did not lead to enough change before 2 October 2018.
