RUNCORN company Exel UK has been ordered to pay more than £33,000 in fines and costs following the death of an employee in a workplace accident.

The company pleaded guilty to offences under the Safety and Work Act during a court case brought by Halton Borough Council. At the time of the accident the company was known as Tibbett and Britten.

John Rowland, 24, of Runcorn, a warehouse operative and forklift truck driver, was killed on April 14, 2004, after a half-tonne bale of plastic fell off an HGV trailer and struck him.

Runcorn Magistrates Court heard he was unloading the trailer with colleagues at about 8.30pm when the palletised bale of plastic fell from it.

Mr Rowland was pulling back a curtain on the side of the trailer when it fell on top of him and trapped him underneath.

Paramedics helped his colleagues to remove the bale but Mr Rowland died in hospital a few hours later.

The court heard the firm's employees had admitted they had seen items fall from trailers and that restraint straps were not always used correctly to stabilise loads.

The company had undertaken risk assessments and had produced a safe system of work, but the system had not been implemented and the staff had not been formally trained in it.

The safe system of work document made no reference to how unsafe loads should be dealt with and did not specify how unsafe loads should be identified.

And a process involving taking pictures of unsafe loads and e-mailing them back to the depot responsible, before a decision on how to unload safely could be made, was undocumented.

The court ruled that the defendant had failed to maintain a system of work by having no written company procedure for dealing with unsafe loads.

The decision as to whether a trailer was safe to unload was at the operative's discretion.

There was no common under-standing of what represented an 'unsafe load'.

Tibbett and Britten had ceased trading in July 2004 and was bought out by Exel after the accident happened.

The company's management had the option of winding up Tibbett and Britten but chose to keep it in existence so it could deal with the court proceedings, knowing the company was to plead guilty and would be fined.