At Abertillery Magistrates Court on 6/8/09 a service provider for the control of legionella pleaded guilty to three charges under Section 3(1) of the Health and Safety at Work etc Act 1974. They were fined £24,000 and ordered to pay costs of £17,276.

A Facilities Management company had been contracted to undertake annual visits to the client premises to assess and also review the risks from legionella in the hot and cold water systems at Nursing Homes owned or managed by the client.

The assessments included very basic schematics which did not identify all hot and cold water storage tanks or all outlets. The assessments also failed to identify sentinel outlets and a small sample of outlets were checked for temperatures during the visits. At one home where there were 11 hot storage tanks approximately 3 hot outlets were checked for temperatures and these had temperatures between 38 degrees C and 43 degrees C and were taken after the TMV's. There was no attempt to check the distribution temperature prior to the TMV's.

The assessor also failed to check the hot water storage temperatures. The risk assessment then went on to state that the homes were compliant with L8 and that the risk was low.

The HSE were of the opinion that this was misleading and that the risk from legionella at the premises had not been established by the contractor and was in fact, with the controls that were in place, high.

All the homes had vulnerable people who would be more at risk from exposure to the bacteria. The client company had a policy in place which, in the opinion of the HSE, failed to clearly separate scald risk monitoring from the risk from legionella and so staff at homes could have been confused. However, the policy did have some key controls identified which were not being implemented at the homes concerned and the contractor's employees were not sufficiently trained to manage the risks.

Two Improvement Notices were served on the client to which they invested heavily and complied with over a 6 month period. Whilst priority was given to the homes identified in the Notices, the facilities management contractor engaged a new water treatment company / assessment company to assess the risks at all of their premises and to provide training of staff within an agreed timescale across all of their estate which is in excess of 250 premises.