Wilkinson fined millions after Midlands employee left paralysed

Retailer Wilko has been fined more than £2 million after an employee wascrushed by a cage filled with dozens of pots of paint and left paralysed.

Corisande Collins was 20 when she was crushed by the cage, leaving herwheelchair bound and with a 1% chance of walking again.

Ms Collins, who was working part-time at the store in Beaumont Leys, Leicester, suffered severe spinal injuries in the August 2013 incident.

Leicester Crown Court heard Wilko Retail Limited pleaded guilty to fouroffences under the Health and Safety at Work Act and was made to pay a £2.2million fine and costs of £70,835.91.

Leicester City Council’s Public Safety Team brought the prosecution against them.The firm, which is based in Worksop, Nottinghamshire, and has nearly 400 stores across the UK, including four in Leicester, has a turnover of £1.4bn.

Ms Collins, of Glenfield, was a first year student at Northampton University working towards a degree in Special Educational Needs at the time of the accident.

The court had previously heard how a heavily-laden, top-heavy metal cage known as a roll cage, which was loaded with paint tins, had fallen on her while she was trying to manoeuvre it out from an uneven lift floor.

Wilko Retail Ltd admitted four breaches of health and safety legislation. The court heard how the floor of the main goods lift and passenger lift was not level with the shop floor, and the roll cage which fell on Ms Collins was incorrectly loaded.

Passing sentence, Judge Ebraham Mooncey imposed the £2.2million fine for the first of four Health and Safety offences - failing to ensure the health, safety and welfare of employees - imposing no separate penalty for the other three related offences.

Ms Collins spent weeks at Coventry’s Walsgrave Hospital following the accident, before being transferred to the spinal injuries unit at Sheffield for extensive rehabilitation.She was eventually discharged in December 2013, and 18 months after her injury had returned part-time to her university course.Ms Collins, who is now 23, said: