Taylor Wimpey has been fined £800,000 after a teenage apprentice was injured when a temporary stairwell covering collapsed.

Charlie Marsh, 17, had been working as a contractor on a Taylor Wimpey site as it built around 450 new homes on its Meadfields site in Weston-Super-Mare.

The apprentice bricklayer, from Whitchurch in Bristol, was less than 12 months into his career when the incident happened.

An HSE investigation found that on 22 August 2023 Marsh had been loading concrete blocks onto the temporary flooring on the first floor of one of the newly built homes. The blocks were being loaded into stacks of between 10 and 20, one of which was on or near to a temporary stairwell covering.

This was a large area covered with a timber sheet material laid over joists – both of which would be later removed to install the staircase.

But the area collapsed, causing Marsh and around 20kg of the concrete blocks to fall more than two metres to the ground below. He sustained injuries to his fingers, hand, wrist and shoulder.

The investigation found that the joists under the timber sheet material should have been back propped. This was mentioned a number of times in Taylor Wimpey’s own health and safety manual for the site but it had been missed on this particular plot.

Taylor Wimpey UK Limited pleaded guilty to safety breaches and was fined £800,000 and ordered to pay £6,240.25 costs with a £2000 victim surcharge at North Somerset Magistrates’ Court.

HSE inspector Derek Mclauchlan said: “Any work involving structural stability is potentially high risk and proper planning and implementation should be given.

“This incident could have been avoided had the right steps been taken.

“The failures of Taylor Wimpey resulted in a young man at the very beginning of his career being injured. Charlie was lucky those injuries were not far more serious.

“Lessons should be learned.”