Construction company’s penalty doubled to $50,000 on appeal

The Geelong County Court in Victoria doubled the penalty for a construction company on appeal in relation to an incident in which a pedestrian narrowly escaped injury (WorkSafe Victoria v E.J. Lyons & Sons Proprietary Limited [2025]).

The construction company, E.J. Lyons & Sons Proprietary Limited, was the principal contractor for a multi-level construction project in Geelong. A scaffolding company set up scaffolding at the workplace, but the construction company engaged another subcontractor to provide carpentry labour and install hoarding at the front of the workplace.

In December 2021, the scaffolding company completed a section of scaffolding at the façade of the workplace and provided a ‘Scaffold Handover Certificate’. The scaffolding company raised concerns that the hoarding that had been attached to the scaffolding was not “designed or engineered to hold and support” it, did not comply with the current engineering certification and undermined the greater structure.

Accordingly, the scaffolding company requested the hoarding be removed from the scaffolding and recommended that the construction company engage an engineer to advise on bracing the hoarding. However, the construction company did not engage an engineer, and the hoarding remained attached to the scaffold for approximately 1 year.

In December the following year, prior to the Christmas shut-down period, the scaffolding was removed from the front of the building. To do this, the scaffolding company requested that the construction company untie the hoarding from the scaffolding but advised that the hoarding would need to be secured before construction works concluded for the year.

On 28 December 2022, the hoarding on the façade collapsed onto the adjacent pedestrian footpath. The collapsed hoarding was approximately 20 metres long and 3.5 metres high. As it fell, it narrowly missed a pedestrian and caused damage to three parked cars.

The Court held that the construction company failed to eliminate or reduce the risk to health and safety as it failed to take reasonably practicable steps to address the risk, including to ensure that:

the hoarding and hoarding structure was designed by a suitably qualified structural engineer, and had counterweights and bracing for structural integrity;
the design of the hoarding system addressed wind loading, impacts and stability; and
the hoarding structure was a self-supporting system.

The Geelong Magistrates’ Court originally sentenced the construction company, which pleaded guilty to failing to ensure people other than employees were not exposed to risks to their health and safety, without conviction, to pay a fine of $25,000 and ordered it pay costs in the amount of $6,289. The County Court found the penalty to be manifestly inadequate given the objective seriousness of the offence, and so convicted the construction company and ordered it to pay a fine of $50,000 and costs.

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