High Street chain “New Look” fined record £ 400,000 for breaches of fire safety.

A major high street chain “New Look” have been fined a record £400,000 for major breaches of fire safety, and also ordered to pay costs of £136,000 after a horrific blaze had turned one of their stores into a possible death trap.

The store in Oxford Street London, which was found to have had not enough emergency exits, and that their staff had not had suitable and sufficient training.  Judge Geoffrey Rivlin QC said this fire could have been a ‘disaster almost too awful to contemplate’.

At Southwark Crown Court in London had heard the store was very busy with evening shoppers when smoke was found to be pouring out of a window on the second floor.

With the alarm sounding, it was puzzlingly turned off and customers were allowed to carry on with their shopping. When the alarm had re-activated again the staff failed to react.

The staff only reacted when passers-by were shouting warnings to them when they realised there was a problem and then they started to panic and get everyone out of the premises.

The Court was informed that when the shoppers were evacuating out of the building out of the front entrance, smoke was pouring out of the building as well as windows were being blown out.  Some of the shoppers when escaping from the store had fallen over, while others were protecting themselves from broken glass pouring down on them from above.

A security guard from the store made a 999 call just before 7 pm on April 26, 2007 – several minutes after the manager from a store opposite had already informed the emergency services.

Joanne Weaver, who was shopping in the store, said that the fire alarm went off ‘intermittently’, and said that an initial lack of staff reaction did nothing to ‘suggest there was a problem’. So she went down to the basement – which could have been the most hazardous place during a fire, as it had no properly available fire exit and carried on shopping through the shoe department.

There was at least another 20 people in the basement until a member of the staff told them to evacuate the building.  She claimed that despite a ‘sort of panic’ then setting in there was still ‘no advice or assistance given to the shoppers, and no explanation as to what the problem was.
Ms Weaver was left to her own devices so she ran up the escalator, across the ground floor without knowing passing under the intense fire above, and then exiting through the front entrance.

‘I could hear the sound of the windows breaking and I felt the heat’.  Ms Weaver also added; ‘Staff within the shop did not seem to have a plan to evacuate people’. ‘They went from no cause of alarm to panic’.

The court were also informed that 150 people in the New Look store all managed to evacuate safe and sound, with another 300 people were evacuated from local premises.

Prosecutor Sada Naqshbandi informed the court that 30 Fire Brigade appliances ended up at the scene.  ‘The West End became gridlocked as traffic was diverted from the area and the fire fighters worked through the night’.  She also told the court the area remained closed to traffic for a further two days, with the Emergency Services remained at the scene for over a week.

The Fire, which devastated the building and was later demolished, was found to have been started in the second floor storeroom. The cause of the fire was never discovered.

New Look Retailers Ltd which has over 600 stores in the UK and overseas and has 20,000 staff and is in the top 30 of private companies pleaded guilty to two counts of breaches of fire safety.

They were fined £250,000 for failing to provide a ‘suitable and sufficient’ fire risk assessment for their store and a further £150.000 for inadequate fire safety training for their staff.

The fine of £400,000 is the largest given to a company in the UK for fire safety breaches since the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 came in to force in 2006.  This is the biggest record financial fine given to a company for breaches of fire safety.