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The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) wants more main contractors to follow Laing O’Rourke’s example and ditch firms with poor health and safety records from their supply chains.

Laing O’Rourke previously announced that it will slash its 2,000-strong supply chain to just 500 by the end of the year. Now it says firms’ safety records will be a major deciding factor on whether they stay or get the boot. Speaking to Construction News (CN), its procurement director David Watham said: ‘It’s not purely a commercial exercise. We have an increasing proportion of incidents which affect or are because of subcontractors.’

The industry’s health and safety record took another hit this week as three firms were ordered to pay out a total of almost £1m in fines following four deaths. CN reported that the largest fine, for £466,000, was meted out to JCB after the deaths of two employees in less than a year. The excavators division was fined £266,000 after worker Paul McNamara suffered fatal head injuries when he was crushed by the boom of a backhoe loader at Uttoxeter in Staffordshire. He died just 10 months after another man, Darren Ellis, received fatal head injuries when testing a fuel tank on an earthmoving machine for leaks and the inspection plate blew off. JCB Earthmovers was fined £200,000 for his death.

In Kent, Alfred McAlpine Capital Projects were fined £250,000 following the death of a motorcyclist at roadworks on the Isle of Grain in 2005. The motorcyclist had crashed into temporary concrete barriers placed across a road.

Finally, Norfolk-based FJ Chalcroft was appealing the sized of the £260,000 fine it was ordered to pay last October following the death of an employee in November 2003.

All three weeklies reported on last weekend’s fatal crane crash in Manhattan, where at least seven people, including six construction workers died and 17 were injured. The 19-storey crane, on a Reliance Construction Group site, was attached to an apartment block under construction when it toppled onto a neighbouring townhouses. New York’s major Michael Bloomberg described it as one of New York’s worst construction incidents.