IN Brief:
- St James and Lindner Prater were found guilty of health and safety breaches following the 2018 death of coach driver Mick Ferris.
- Foster + Partners and facade design engineer Wintech were acquitted after the trial at Inner London Crown Court.
- Evidence centred on an outward-opening penthouse window system, a previous panel failure, and the circumstances surrounding the 130kg window that fell in 2018.
St James and facade specialist Lindner Prater have been found guilty of health and safety breaches following the death of coach driver Mick Ferris, who was killed when a 130kg window fell from The Corniche residential development in London in 2018.
A jury at Inner London Crown Court acquitted Foster + Partners and facade design engineer Wintech after more than 11 hours of deliberations. All four defendants had denied the charges brought in connection with risks created by outward-opening penthouse windows at the development.
Ferris, 53, died on 2 October 2018 when a glazed panel fell from the 25th-floor penthouse and struck him on the pavement below. The building on Albert Embankment was approaching completion at the time.
The court heard that another window panel had fallen from the development in August 2017 without causing injury. That earlier incident became central to the prosecution case because it demonstrated that a panel could detach before the fatal failure occurred the following year.
Evidence presented during the trial described how the penthouse windows had originally been intended to open inwards before the configuration was changed to outward opening. Jurors heard that the change was made to avoid a clash with an internal ceiling coffer containing building services.
The fatal panel was blown off its hinges after opening beyond its intended limit. The court was told that a restrictor intended to constrain the opening had been removed, and prosecutors argued that the consequences of restrictor failure had not been adequately addressed.
The jury ultimately distinguished between the four defendants. St James and Lindner Prater were convicted of failing in their duties to protect the public under the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974, while Foster + Partners and Wintech were cleared.
That distinction is important for construction reporting. A project can contain numerous designers, specialists, contractors, and client organisations without every participant carrying identical responsibility for every technical decision. The verdicts need to be reported according to the jury’s findings rather than by treating involvement with the building as evidence of liability.
For the wider industry, the case nevertheless focuses attention on a familiar technical problem: changes made at the interfaces between architectural intent, specialist design, services coordination, manufacture, installation, and operation can alter the safety characteristics of a component even where the change appears limited in scope.
Windows and facade elements are particularly dependent on those interfaces. Geometry, hinges, fixings, restrictors, glass, frames, wind loading, opening clearances, maintenance arrangements, and surrounding finishes all influence the final behaviour of the installed assembly.
A design adjustment made to resolve a clash with internal services can therefore have consequences beyond the immediate coordination problem. If a window opens in a different direction, or through a different range of movement, its loads, restraints, clearances, and failure modes need to be reconsidered as part of the revised system.
The earlier 2017 panel fall also raises a separate construction-management issue around the handling of serious warnings. Projects routinely generate defects, non-conformances, test results, snagging records, inspection findings, and technical queries. Most are routine; some indicate that an assumption underpinning the design or installation may be wrong.
Distinguishing between the two is critical. Closing an isolated defect is not the same as establishing why it occurred, particularly where the consequence of repetition could be severe. A previous failure can require the design team to reconsider the system rather than simply repair the individual component.
The Corniche prosecution arose under health and safety legislation applicable to the events in 2017 and 2018, before the current higher-risk building regime was introduced. The verdict should not therefore be described as a test of Gateway 2, the golden thread, or the Building Safety Act.
The underlying technical questions are nevertheless relevant to current project governance. Modern high-rise teams are expected to define design responsibilities earlier, retain clearer records, and control safety-critical changes more formally, but those procedures only work if technical information is actually reviewed across package boundaries.
A facade subcontractor can have detailed knowledge of the envelope while a services designer understands the internal constraints and an architect controls the intended spatial arrangement. Safe coordination depends on those strands being reconciled rather than each organisation considering only the portion of the system inside its own contract.
The acquittals underline the other side of that argument. Responsibility cannot be assigned retrospectively simply because a party attended design meetings or contributed to the project. Contractual roles, technical duties, information, decisions, and the evidence before the court determine liability in a specific case.
After years of investigation and legal proceedings, the jury has now reached different conclusions for the four organisations tried over the Corniche failure. For current project teams, the useful construction lesson lies in the period before an incident reaches a courtroom: design changes, previous failures, and safety-critical interfaces need technical resolution while the building is still under the control of those designing and constructing it.
