The UK’s largest pub company has been found guilty of breaching health and safety law after the “senseless and avoidable” death of a first-year university student who was queuing to get into a busy venue.
Olivia Burt, a 20-year-old life sciences student at Durham University, 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.
Stonegate Pub Company, the operator of the bar, was on trial at Teesside crown court accused of health and safety breaches.
A judge had ruled that three of the charges should be dismissed. On Thursday a jury found the company guilty of the one remaining charge.
Judge Howard Crowson said the only sentence, which he would hand down on Friday after hearing submissions, was a financial penalty.
Earlier in the trial Jamie Hill KC, prosecuting for Durham county council, said the death of Burt, from Milford on Sea in the New Forest, 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.”
The venue was full of student sports teams and Burt, a member of the sailing club, was part of a crowd gathered outside, waiting to get in.
“She was an innocent woman doing nothing wrong and who deserved to be kept safe,” Hill said. “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.”
The heavy screen had fallen earlier in the evening as crowds gathered to get in, but the court heard it was lifted back into place and the chance to avert a tragedy was missed when it happened again about 30 minutes later, with fatal consequences.
Her parents, Nigel and Paula Burt, said afterwards that Olivia was their only child and meant everything to them.
“It is incomprehensible to us how she could have died on a night out with friends whilst simply standing in a queue,” they said.
“Stonegate is the largest pub company in the UK. According to their annual report 2022, Stonegate doubled their revenue to £1.6bn and their vision is ‘to raise the bar on the British pub by being the best for our guests, people and communities’. This did not happen at Missoula and led to the death of our wonderful daughter.”
They said it had been a long journey.
“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.”
