Stonemason fined for exposing workers to silica dust as HSE updates advice for stone worktop installers

Doncaster-based Warmsworth Stone Limited, which makes carved stone masonry products from limestone, sandstone, granite and marble, “repeatedly” failed to protect workers from exposure to Respirable Crystalline Silica (RSC), said HSE, which inspected the company’s site a number of times from May 2023.

Photograph: iStock/cagkansayin

The regulator served Warmsworth Stone with seven improvement notices – five of which had not been adhered to by the time HSE inspectors visited again in September 2023. HSE said the company had shown “reckless disregard” for guidelines related to the assessment and control of respirable dust. 

“The company failed to take the initiative in health and safety matters and seek guidance, instruction and competent advice on implementation and communication of those measures necessary to control the risks at the site,” said HSE inspector Charlotte Bligh. “The provision of suitable protection for workers’ health is a basic requirement that this company has failed to meet.”

Warmsworth Stone pleaded guilty to breaching section 21 of Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 by failing to comply with an Improvement Notice, breaching Regulation 7(1) of the Control of Substances Hazardous to Health Regulations 2002 by failing to adequately control employee exposure to a substance hazardous to health, namely RCS, and breaching Regulation 9(2)(a) the same Regulations by failing to have local exhaust ventilation subject to a thorough examination and test at least every 14 months.

The company was fined £18,000 and ordered to pay costs of £4,064. Director Simon Jonathan Frith was fined an additional £1,062 d ordered to pay £3,782 in costs.

It comes as HSE issued new, simplified advice on how to protect workers from exposure to stone dust and prevent them from breathing in RCS while cutting stone – including engineered stone. Over time, inhaling silica particles can cause deadly lung diseases such as silicosis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and lung cancer.

Steps to minimise the risk of exposure include using prefabricated worktops that do not need to be processed on-site, using water suppression and dust collectors, and providing workers with adequate respiratory protection equipment, such as FFP3 face masks.

The advice comes amid growing calls to ban engineered stone in the UK. The material has already been banned in California and Australia. Writing in Safety Management in August 2024, Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (Natalie Bennett) – a Green Party peer in the House of Lords who sits on the All Party Parliamentary Group for Respiratory Health – called for a ban on new engineered stone worktops and for silicosis to be made a reportable disease. Engineered stone has a much higher silica content than granite and marble.

Clinicians at the Royal Brompton Hospital in London warned about the dangers of silica exposure and called for artificial stone to be banned in a study published last year in the Thorax journal. The warning came after doctors at the hospital began treating the first identified cases of silicosis caused by working with engineered stone in the UK.

However, bans can be “problematic” because they are “very hard to implement successfully”, Kevin Bampton, chief executive of the British Occupational Hygiene Society, said in an article for Safety Management in September.

“Further research should be undertaken urgently to understand whether there are specific properties of engineered stone which create additional risk,” wrote Bampton. “Restricting the demand and supply of high silica materials should provide the economic stimulus to encourage alternative products and start the gradual process of reducing the huge health burden created by our age-old love of silica-based products.”