Background
Robert Richardson, a director of an agricultural plant equipment business with roughly 25 years of experience, was invited by an old friend and customer, Tom Gardiner of William Beech Skip Hire Limited, to attend the defendant’s yard on 9 November 2024 to measure replacement blades on a demolition grab fitted to a Caterpillar waste handler. Richardson was an experienced agricultural engineer but had no particular familiarity with the Caterpillar, which was a plant machine outside his usual line of work. Gardiner and his employee Bella Kovacs, who operated the machine, were both trained and experienced with it.
After Richardson had taken his measurements, Gardiner directed him to also record the serial number from a label on the grab. While Richardson stood between the lowering grab and the body of the machine — cleaning the muddy label at Gardiner’s direction — Kovacs inadvertently knocked the joystick control. The grab suddenly retracted and crushed Richardson’s legs against the machine. He subsequently underwent bilateral through-knee amputations and suffered additional physical and psychological injuries.
The defendant admitted primary liability, accepting vicarious responsibility for Kovacs’s inadvertent joystick movement, but alleged contributory negligence. District Judge Dickinson entered judgment for the claimant with damages to be assessed, and the matter was listed for trial solely on contributory negligence. The defendant argued a 40% reduction (alternatively no less than one-third); the claimant argued for no reduction, or at most 10–15%.
The Court’s Holding
HHJ Emma Kelly (sitting as a High Court judge) analysed the contributory negligence question against the framework in Badger v Ministry of Defence [2005] EWHC 2941: was there fault on the claimant’s part, did that fault contribute to the injury, and if so, what reduction is just and equitable? The court set out the objective standard — a person is contributorily negligent if a reasonable, prudent person in his position ought to have foreseen that acting as he did might result in harm to himself (Froom v Butcher [1976] QB 286; Jones v Livox Quarries Ltd [1952] 1 QB 608). At the same time, the court emphasised that workers are entitled to place reasonable reliance on those controlling machinery to do their duty, and that mere inadvertence in a working context does not automatically cross into actionable contributory fault (Caswell v Powell Duffryn [1940] AC 152; Grant v San Shipping Co Ltd [1948] AC 549).
The court closely examined the CCTV footage, which showed that Richardson moved between the grab and the machine body while the grab was still descending, that Gardiner was himself standing immediately alongside Richardson and did not warn him away, and that Kovacs — who had full visibility of Richardson’s position from the cab — neither turned off the machine nor activated the isolation switch before Richardson stepped in. The court weighed those facts against the defendant’s reliance on Richardson’s own company risk assessment (dated just three weeks before the accident), which identified running machinery as a hazard and called for isolation before any maintenance work. Richardson distinguished that document as applying to maintenance tasks, not the task of reading a serial number at a customer’s direction.
On apportionment the court was required to weigh the causative potency and relative blameworthiness of each party’s conduct, in the broad, jury-like manner endorsed in Jackson v Murray [2015] UKSC 5, guarding against the mechanical use of other decided cases whose facts inevitably differ (Jolley v Sutton LBC [2000] 1 WLR 1082). The defendant bore the burden of proving contributory negligence throughout.
Key Takeaways
- A visitor to an employer’s premises carrying out an inspection task at the employer’s direction is not automatically contributorily negligent merely because the employer’s own machinery was running; foreseeability of personal harm must be assessed objectively and in context, including what a reasonable person would expect of those controlling the equipment.
- The presence of the employer’s director standing directly alongside the claimant without warning, and the machine operator’s unobstructed view of the claimant’s position without action, are powerful indicators that the risk was not one a reasonable person in the claimant’s position would have appreciated and guarded against.
- A claimant’s own workplace risk assessment may be relied on by a defendant to support contributory negligence, but courts will scrutinise carefully whether the document actually applied to the task being performed at the time of the accident.
- Mere inadvertence or a momentary failure to appreciate a danger — particularly in a context where the person controlling the hazard is present and raises no alarm — may fall short of the fault required to reduce damages under the Law Reform (Contributory Negligence) Act 1945.
Why It Matters
This decision is a careful application of long-standing principles on contributory negligence in the workplace to a fact pattern involving a visitor who suffered catastrophic injuries from machinery controlled entirely by the defendant’s own personnel. It reinforces that the objective standard of the “reasonable prudent person” must be calibrated to the full circumstances — including what the person reasonably expected of trained operators who were present, watching, and said nothing. Employers and their insurers cannot simply point to a claimant’s proximity to running machinery as sufficient to establish contributory fault when the defendant’s own employees had control, visibility, and the means to make the situation safe.
The case is also a practical reminder that internal risk assessments, while valuable evidence of a party’s awareness of hazards, must be read in the context of the task actually being performed. Where a claimant was acting on a customer’s specific instruction rather than performing an independent maintenance operation, a document drafted for the latter purpose will not automatically govern the former. Given the severity of the injuries — bilateral through-knee amputations — the apportionment outcome will significantly affect the quantum of a very substantial damages award.