National Grid Gas: £4M HSE Fine

What happened

When National Grid Gas sold its gas distribution operations to Cadent Gas in 2016, safety maintenance records for 769 high-rise residential buildings were not properly transferred. The following year, when the HSE requested those records to verify that required safety inspections of gas risers had been carried out, the company could not demonstrate that the buildings had ever been inspected, maintained, or surveyed. No harm had occurred at those buildings. The fine of £4 million, one of the largest HSE fines of 2021, was imposed purely because the safety inspections could not be evidenced retroactively. The judge's reasoning was explicit: the absence of records was itself evidence of inadequate safety management. A blockchain-timestamped record of each inspection, created at the time of completion, would have survived the corporate transfer and provided irrefutable proof that the inspections had occurred and when.