Wm Morrison Supermarkets: £3.5M H&S Prosecution

What happened

A Wm Morrison employee with a known epilepsy condition died after suffering a seizure while descending a staff staircase. Morrison's own internal procedures required that an individual risk assessment be prepared for any employee with a disability. No such assessment had ever been prepared for the deceased employee, despite his family raising formal concerns about that particular staircase before the incident. The prosecution did not turn on a failure in staircase design or some external factor: it turned on the absence of the required risk assessment document. Morrison was convicted on all four charges and fined £3.5 million. The case illustrates how the absence of a single timestamped compliance document, which should have been created at the time the relevant decision was made, can become the central evidence in a prosecution.