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Bupa handed record fine for fire safety breaches after care home death
Private healthcare provider Bupa must pay a record £1.04m after one of its care home residents burned to death in a fire.
Bupa Care Services (ANS) Ltd, which runs the Manley Court care home in Brockley, south-east London, was fined £937,500 for fire safety failings and ordered to pay £104,000 prosecution costs after Cedric Skyers died while smoking unsupervised.
Handed down at Southwark Crown Court earlier this month after the London Fire Brigade (LFB) brought forward the prosecution, it is the highest ever fine for fire safety breaches in the UK.
Bupa pleaded guilty to fire safety breaches and accepted that staff had failed to assess the risks of Mr Skyers’ emollient creams, which can be flammable if allowed to build up on skin, clothing or bedding.
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The LFB brought forward the case after attending the incident in March 2016.
Mr Skyers, a 69-year-old wheelchair user, died after catching fire while smoking unsupervised in a shelter in the garden of the home.
A subsequent investigation found that as well as the lack of assessment of the fire risk of his creams, burn marks from previous incidents were found on Mr Skyers’ clothing after his death.
Care home staff said they had not been aware of these. They said that if they had been, they would have ensured more regular checks were made when he was smoking.
Paul Jennings, assistant commissioner for fire safety at the LFB, said the “harrowing” case was a “tragic example of what the devastating consequences” of failing to to comply with fire safety regulations can be.
He added the home could have put a number of measures in place to mitigate the fire risks to Mr Skyers, but “none” were implemented.
“Mr Skyers’ family should rightly have been able to trust that he would be safe in a care home, when sadly the opposite was true,” Mr Jennings stated.
He said the large fine “highlights the seriousness” of Bupa’s failure to protect a vulnerable resident in its care.
“If there can be anything constructive to come from this, we hope that it will be that anyone who has a legal responsibility for fire safety in a building – whether as a landlord, property manager, care home provider or any other setting – takes note and makes sure they are complying with the law,” he said.
Donald Day, operations director at Manley Court, said: “Our thoughts and condolences are with Mr Skyers’ family.
“Following this tragic accident in 2016, we took immediate action across all our care homes to prevent it from happening again.
“We take fire safety extremely seriously and have in place detailed risk assessments for all our residents that smoke, increased supervision and we ensure our teams are regularly trained in fire safety measures.
“The well-being of residents in our care is always our priority and we are committed to keeping everyone in our homes safe.”
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