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Cameron House Hotel Fire. Porter Gets Light Touch From Court

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Messy
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Cameron House Hotel Fire. Porter Gets Light Touch From Court

Post by Messy »

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland- ... t-55855271

The trail following two deaths on the Cameron House Hotel has ended with the Hotel being fined £500k - a fairly reasonable fine - but the won't-be-told porter who placed hot ashes in a plastic bag, then in a cupboard containing kindling - gets away with a 300hr community payback type award

The hotel ignored 2 x consecutive annual fire risk assessments and a warning from the Scottish Fire & Rescue Service about the handling of the ash
The porter was told 3 days before not to do it, but continued the ridiculous behaviour.

Its well established that the law will always go for the corporate scalp, and so they should have here as the hotel failed in their duties.
But when are Courts going properly hold members of staff to account for their actions? The porter should have gone down and served a community payback award for wilfully ignoring management instructions
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Re: Cameron House Hotel Fire. Porter Gets Light Touch From Court

Post by witsd »

Once again, I'm shocked that no-one has ended up in prison.

No, I'm not, not really. The only thing I can think is that the 'lack of training' threw him some kind of a lifeline here, but having been told specifically not to do the exact thing that caused the fire seems entirely damning to my non-lawyer mind.
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Re: Cameron House Hotel Fire. Porter Gets Light Touch From Court

Post by Ewangoil »

I think this is a perfect example of poor "safety culture". Yes the porter has got off lightly but looking at the root causes:
"The hotel ignored 2 x consecutive annual fire risk assessments and a warning from the Scottish Fire & Rescue Service about the handling of the ash"
To me this points the finger squarely at the management of the hotel and the overall attitude from the company towards safety.
As is always the case, Safety culture comes from the top down. If management/Directors don't lead by example then they can't expect their staff to tow the line. That's just my opinion. Thoughts?
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Re: Cameron House Hotel Fire. Porter Gets Light Touch From Court

Post by witsd »

I have to be very, very careful here, but in around 2017 I completed multiple fire risk assessments for a very similar business.

Suffice to say, I was not impressed, as (for example) the main building had many of the faults that appeared to be present here, and a similar profit > safety attitude. Thankfully dumping hot ash in a cupboard was not one of them, but placing wheelchair-bound members in top floor rooms accessible only by a single stairwell which was in the same compartment as a bar and shop was. I really hope that they took the Cameron fire as a wake-up call and sorted themselves out, because I didn't have any confidence that they paid attention to the FRA.
We often think that when we have completed our study of one we know all about two, because 'two' is 'one and one.' We forget that we still have to make a study of 'and.'
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