Food manufacturer Moy Park fined £200k for engineer laceration

The incident occurred when a cutting line machine the engineer was inspecting restarted, meaning his hand was caught in the blade, Lincoln Crown Court heard.

An investigation by the HSE found that Moy Park had failed to implement a safe system of work in relation to isolating procedures when maintaining the machinery in the production line.

HSE principal inspector David Butter said: “Duty holders must put measures in place to ensure there are safe procedures in place which are then followed when checking faults on machinery.”

Moy Park was fined £200,000 for breaching Section 2 (1) of the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 and was ordered to pay costs of nearly £12,000.

Moy Park operates 13 processing and manufacturing units in England, Northern Ireland, France, the Netherlands and the Republic of Ireland, and has the capacity to process 240 million birds annually. That is in addition to producing around 200,000 tonnes of food per year.