IN Brief:
- Lunar Freezing and Cold Storage was fined £245,000 at Peterhead Sheriff Court on 28 October 2026 for a failure to prevent access to dangerous machinery.
- A fixed guard had been absent for about two weeks, allowing workers to bypass an interlocked gate when boxes jammed in a rack loader.
- The HSE identified missing physical guarding, incomplete weekly checks, and the failure to isolate machinery before clearing a blockage.
Lunar Freezing and Cold Storage Company Limited has been fined £245,000 after a production worker was pulled into machinery at its fish processing plant in Peterhead, Scotland. The worker suffered a fractured jaw and injuries to his arm and chest while clearing a blockage in a rack loader. Peterhead Sheriff Court imposed the fine on 28 October 2026 and ordered the company to pay an £18,375 victim surcharge.
The accident occurred on 19 August 2025 when a 30-year-old chargehand encountered a box jammed too high inside the rack loader cage to reach from the floor. He entered the production line through an opening left by a missing fixed guard, climbed onto the conveyor and pressed on the box lid to free it. The equipment had not been isolated from its power supply. When the mechanism restarted, its pusher section caught his right arm and drew him further into the machine.
As the worker was pulled towards the moving parts, his head struck the equipment. A colleague heard his calls for help and disconnected the power, allowing him to be rescued. He was taken to Aberdeen Royal Infirmary, where surgeons inserted metal plates to repair his jaw. He remained in hospital for three days, returned to work on 29 September 2025 and subsequently made a full recovery, according to the Health and Safety Executive (HSE).
The missing guard had been removed during maintenance approximately two weeks before the accident and was never replaced. Its absence created a direct route into the operating machinery beside the intended access point. That access point was an interlocked gate: opening the gate would have stopped the equipment. Workers instead used the gap to deal with jammed boxes, bypassing the protection built into the authorised entrance.
Maintenance employees had seen the missing section and observed colleagues entering through the opening. The problem also escaped the site’s weekly maintenance inspections because the checklist covered electrical safety components without requiring verification of non-electrical fixed guards. A check could therefore be completed without establishing that the physical barrier around the moving equipment had been restored after maintenance. The unsafe access arrangement remained available during normal production.
The rack loader moved boxes through a confined mechanical handling path, using conveyors and a driven pusher. When a box became trapped, the obstruction interrupted its normal travel; releasing it could allow the equipment to resume movement while somebody was still inside the hazardous area. The accident developed precisely during that intervention. The HSE established that the worker entered while the machinery remained powered and was struck after the jam was released.
Fixed guarding and interlocked access protect against different routes into a machine. A fixed panel separates workers from the danger zone during normal operation, while the interlock is intended to stop movement when an authorised gate is opened. Neither arrangement removes the need to isolate and secure the power supply before maintenance, cleaning or blockage-clearing work where a person might reach moving parts. The missing panel undermined the first barrier and enabled entry without triggering the second.
Regulation 11 of the Provision and Use of Work Equipment Regulations 1998 requires effective measures to prevent access to dangerous machinery or stop dangerous movement before a person can reach it. The HSE’s investigation found that the failure to reinstate fixed guarding exposed workers to the rack loader’s moving mechanisms. The company pleaded guilty to breaching Regulation 11(1) and (2), with proceedings brought under the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974.
The maintenance history shows how a temporary removal became a continuing production hazard. A guard taken off to reach a component needs to be reinstated before operation resumes, with its presence checked as part of the handover. At Peterhead, repeated access through the opening became an established response to blockages, even as the formal inspection process continued. Physical checks of panels, fixings and access routes would have addressed a different risk from tests of electrical interlocks alone.
HSE inspector Nicky Smith said: “Guards must be kept in place, and checks must cover every guard, not just the electrical ones.” The regulator’s guidance also addresses isolation and lock-off to prevent unexpected start-up while people intervene in machinery. In this case, the opening, the powered equipment and the routine practice of entering the gap combined to place the worker inside the movement envelope of the rack loader.
The court’s decision follows a workplace machinery safety prosecution rather than a food product safety action. Its documented findings concern a missing guard, a bypassed interlocked route, and inspections that failed to cover fixed guarding. Those conditions persisted for around two weeks before a jam-clearing operation ended in serious injury and a £245,000 fine.
