Teenage worker dies from injuries sustained in accident that killed his father.
So here we are again then, reporting upon yet another double death within the UK construction industry.
One death is bad. Two deaths are terrible. The fact that, in this instance, we’re talking about a father and son makes this even more tragic.
When the Health and Safety Executive presents its annual accident statistics for 2021, David and Clayton Bottomley will be represented as a number. But these two men are not a statistic.
There is a family in Yorkshire right now that has lost a father and husband, a son and a brother in a single incident. Clayton Bottomley had his whole life ahead of him. David Bottomley was younger than me.
Both are now gone. Both died within an industry that – for all its innovations and advances – continues to maim and kill workers at an unacceptable rate.
This is a multi-billion pound industry that can erect buildings that stretch a kilometre into the sky.
It is an industry that can construct tunnels beneath the seabed to link cities and entire countries. It is an industry that can build roads, bridge and railway lines that would have been unimaginable just a few decades ago. An industry that builds hundreds of thousands of homes and that employs hundreds of thousands of people.
The construction industry can be rightly proud of almost everything it creates.
But what is the true value of that pride when it is an industry that, in the name of progress and in the pursuit of profit, it continues to create widows and orphans?
