A judge has fined the UK’s largest pub group £1.56m after it was found guilty of a health and safety breach which contributed to the “senseless and avoidable” death of a first-year university student queueing to get into a venue in Durham.
Olivia Burt, a 20-year-old natural sciences student from Milford on Sea in the New Forest, died in February 2018 when a heavy decorative screen being used to manage the queue into the city centre’s Missoula bar collapsed and fell on her.
A member of the sailing club, Burt had been waiting to get into a regular Wednesday event night popular with university sports teams.
The screen collapsed on Burt, who received an “unsurvivable” head injury, Teesside crown court heard.
Stonegate Pub Company had denied health and safety breaches but a jury found it guilty on Thursday of one charge.
On Friday Judge Howard Crowson said the bar’s management missed an opportunity to prevent Burt’s death when a similar screen collapsed about 30 minutes previously.
The judge said the screens were designed for decoration, not crowd control, and he said he did not accept the defence argument that the screens in themselves were not dangerous.
“Once the screen had fallen, there was obviously a risk it would do so again,” he said. “In this case, in my view, the breach led to the death of Olivia Burt.”
He said Burt’s family had suffered an “incomprehensible tragedy”, adding: “The sentence does not attempt to measure the worth of Olivia’s life. Olivia’s life is, of course, priceless.”
The judge also ordered the company to pay £225,774 in costs.
During the trial Jamie Hill KC, prosecuting for Durham county council, said the death of Burt was “senseless and avoidable”.
He continued: “All she was doing was standing with her friends, waiting to get into a club which had targeted the student population as a way of filling their venue on Wednesday nights.
“She was an innocent woman doing nothing wrong and who deserved to be kept safe. She deserved to be protected by a large organisation that had a lot of written policies.
“It had risk assessments covering just about everything, policies that were supposed to cover all reasonably foreseeable eventualities.
“But the reality is that as soon as the venue, which had become the first-choice venue for students on a Wednesday night, was confronted with more customers than they could accommodate within their own set limits, all of the planning and all the risk assessments came to nought.”
After the verdict on Thursday Burt’s parents, Nigel and Paula Burt, paid moving tribute to their daughter.
Her father said the room would light up when she walked into it. “She was fiercely intelligent but she didn’t let everyone know it. People just seemed to look to her for a lead. I think maybe that’s why she was head girl at school, she was so successful in everything that she did.”
In a joint statement they expressed their anger at Stonegate.
“Our heartbreak and pain have been prolonged by Stonegate pleading not guilty and fighting the case to trial. We have been waiting 1,976 days for Stonegate to be held criminally responsible.
“We thank the jury for seeing through Stonegate’s smoke and mirrors defence blaming everyone but themselves for what happened to Olivia.
“Our lives will never be the same again – we are heartbroken.”
