Left alone to burn to death

A care home company has been hit with a £1 million court bill after a disabled resident set his clothes on a fire when he was left alone to smoke a cigarette.

Cedrick Skyers, 69, was left unsupervised at the Manley Court care home in New Cross, southeast London, despite being a partially paralysed wheelchair user who could not brush his teeth.

Staff at the Bupa care home eventually found Mr Skyer ablaze in the sheltered outdoor area, but were too late to save his life.

The blaze took hold because Mr Skyers’s clothing had become impregnated with the paraffin-based emollient creams he had used, Southwark Crown Court heard.

Several burn marks were found on Mr Skyers’s clothing and in his room after his death, which could be evidence of ‘near miss’ before the fire of March 13, 2016.

Judge David Tomlinson noted the care home sector was already under strain due to staffing levels and increasing numbers of residents at the time of Mr Skyers’s death.

Judge Tomlinson said: ‘It is not known how long he had been on fire before a member of the caring staff noticed, but the best efforts to extinguish the fire were improvised, and came far too late to save him.

‘Since smoking indoors became unlawful, it is not difficult to see how, top-down to those working at the coalface, it was simply assumed that there was no longer any risk of a smoking-related fire being started, for instance, in consequence of a carelessly discarded cigarette coming into contact with curtains, and so on.

‘It was quite simply wrong to assume that if a partially paralysed resident could light and smoke a cigarette, he meant it followed that they could be left to smoke unsupervised.

‘Nothing I will say should be considered as putting some sort of value on the lost life of Mr Skyers.

‘Although this fire was not necessarily contributed to by Mr Skyers’s clothing in fact having become impregnated from the emollient creams, what it nonetheless served to illustrate was the management of the risk, which had not been properly or sufficiently addressed.

‘It was submitted that there hadn’t been any significant efforts to address the risk posed by the use of paraffin-based cream.

‘Reference was also made to burn marks on other items of Mr Skyers’s clothing, to suggest that there had been near miss events prior to his death.

‘There were near-miss warnings in Mr Skyers’s room, in the form of existing burn marks.

‘I do find that there was a failure to put in place measures that were, by the time of Mr Skyers’s death, recognised standards in the industry.’

Bupa now conducts a fire risk assessment every two years at its care homes, and Bupa Fire Safety teams regularly assess care homes, the court heard.

Judge Tomlinson fined the company £937,500 and ordered it to pay £104,425 in prosecution costs.

Bupa admitted one count of failing to take arrangements for the effective control, monitoring, and review of preventative and protective fire safety measures.