IN Brief:
- Lima Construction Limited has been fined £50,000 after a fatal fall from height.
- Antonio Rodrigues fell through an unglazed window opening on a New Malden redevelopment site.
- HSE found that boarding, guard rails, and weekly scaffold inspections had not been properly managed.
Lima Construction Limited has been fined £50,000 after a labourer died following a fall through an unglazed window opening on a redevelopment site in New Malden.
Antonio Rodrigues, 55, was working for the company on a project to convert a former department store on New Malden High Street into commercial and residential units. On 27 July 2022, he fell from an external scaffolding platform through an unglazed window void, landing on an internal concrete ground floor more than three metres below.
Rodrigues was taken to hospital but died from his injuries on 1 August 2022.
The Health and Safety Executive found that window voids had been created in one wall to install glazed Juliet doors. When some of the doors were delivered with damaged glazing panels, they were not installed, leaving four unglazed openings beside the scaffold platform.
Although the company recognised that the openings created a fall-from-height risk, protective boarding was only installed in the hours after the fall. HSE said it would have been reasonably practicable to board the voids or install additional internal scaffold guard rails as soon as the openings were created.
Investigators also found that legally required weekly scaffold inspections had not been carried out after 5 July 2022. HSE said this meant a competent scaffold inspector had not been given the opportunity to identify the risk created by the unglazed openings.
Lima Construction Limited pleaded guilty to contravening Regulation 13(1) of the Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2015. Westminster Magistrates’ Court fined the company £50,000 and ordered it to pay £11,347 in costs.
The case centres on a familiar hazard: a site condition that changed during the build and was not controlled quickly enough. The intended installation sequence had assumed that glazed Juliet doors would close the openings, but damaged products altered that sequence and left an exposed fall risk beside a scaffold working platform.
Refurbishment and conversion projects are especially vulnerable to these changes. Existing structures, product defects, delayed deliveries, design revisions, access constraints, and trade sequencing can all create temporary hazards that were not present in the original plan. When those hazards involve open edges, window voids, risers, lift shafts, roofs, or floor openings, protection has to be immediate.
Falls from height remain one of the construction industry’s most persistent causes of fatal injury. The controls are well established, including guard rails, boarding, exclusion zones, scaffold inspections, harness systems where appropriate, and competent supervision. Serious incidents continue to occur when temporary openings are treated as short-lived or self-evident risks rather than live hazards requiring formal control.
The scaffold inspection failure is also significant. Weekly inspection records are not a compliance formality; they are part of the mechanism for identifying whether access equipment remains safe as the site changes around it. A scaffold that was safe when erected can become unsafe if nearby openings, loading, ties, platforms, or edge protection are altered.
Under CDM, principal contractors must plan, manage, monitor, and coordinate the construction phase so that work can be carried out without exposing workers to avoidable danger. That duty becomes more demanding when multiple trades, incomplete façades, temporary works, and altered installation sequences overlap.
On many sites, the practical risk sits between packages. One trade creates or exposes an opening, another is expected to install the permanent component, and access remains in use while the gap exists. Unless responsibility for temporary protection is clear, the danger can sit in plain sight while everyone waits for the next stage of work.
The New Malden incident also shows why future works cannot be relied on to control present hazards. If a door, window, panel, or permanent barrier has not yet been installed, the opening still requires protection. A short delay, damaged delivery, or change in sequence can leave workers exposed for long enough to cause a fatal accident.
Contractors managing refurbishment projects need rapid escalation routes when planned protection is no longer in place. Site teams should be able to stop access, install temporary controls, record the change, and update inspection requirements without waiting for a wider programme decision.
The fine imposed on Lima Construction reflects both the fatal outcome and the preventable nature of the risk. For the wider industry, the case reinforces a blunt operational requirement: when an opening appears, protection must appear with it. A construction sequence can change without warning, but fall prevention cannot be deferred until the programme catches up.
