On the night of 18 March 2025, maintenance engineer Daniel Slinger was working a night shift alone at a Merseyside animal-feed factory in Knowsley Industrial Park when he was asked to investigate an issue on a conveyor. The conveyor was still running. He reached through a hole in the side of the casing to clear some material — and the moving machinery grabbed his arm.

There was no guard over the opening. There was no emergency stop button within reach. There was nobody else in the area to hear him or see what had happened.

Alone and trapped, Daniel Slinger did the only thing he could: he looked up at a CCTV camera and began to wave. For 40 seconds he waved, hoping someone monitoring the system would notice and come to help.

Nobody did.

Eventually, he managed to free his own arm. The injuries he sustained — extensive degloving of his forearm and hand, fractures, massive blood loss — required multiple operations and transfusions. He continues to receive ongoing specialist treatment. He has not returned to work.

The Investigation

An investigation by the UK’s Health and Safety Executive (HSE) found that the hole in the conveyor casing had been cut into the machine years earlier — a deliberate modification designed to allow workers to clear blockages while the machine continued running. A second conveyor on the same site was found to have an identical unauthorised access point.

Despite the company having risk assessments and safe systems of work on paper, those systems were not followed or enforced. Despite routine management walkarounds and internal audits over the years, neither the dangerous modifications nor the failure to implement proper guarding had been identified or rectified.

Factory Services UK Limited pleaded guilty to breaching Section 2(1) of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 at Warrington Magistrates’ Court on 8 September 2026. The company was fined £160,000 and ordered to pay £4,728 in costs.

The Lessons

HSE Inspector Ian Betley said after the hearing: “Mr Slinger suffered devastating and life-altering injuries as a result of this preventable incident. Had the correct protections been in place he would not have been exposed to the dangerous parts of a running conveyor through a hole cut into the machine.”

This case highlights several critical failures that apply far beyond this one factory:

Machine Guarding: All dangerous parts of machinery must be guarded, and those guards must be maintained. Where a hole or access point has been created in guarding — even years ago, even with good intentions — it represents a serious breach of duty that must be identified and rectified.

Lone Working: Workers in isolated or remote locations must have reliable means of raising an alarm in an emergency. A CCTV camera that no one is actively monitoring is not a safety system. Lone worker check-in procedures, wearable alert devices and accessible emergency stops are essential controls in any environment where workers operate alone.

Safe Systems in Practice: Having a safe system of work on paper is not enough. Employers must ensure those systems are actually followed, understood by workers and enforced by supervisors.

Lock-Out/Tag-Out: Any maintenance, cleaning or clearing work on machinery — even clearing a simple blockage — must be performed only after the machine has been properly isolated and locked out. Running machinery is not a controlled environment.

Daniel Slinger’s case is a reminder that the most dangerous failures in workplace safety are often not the dramatic ones. They are the workarounds that have been in place for years. The paper procedures that nobody checks. The camera that nobody watches.