When Separation Fails: Forklift Prosecutions and the Case for Active Vehicle-Pedestrian Control

The cost of getting separation wrong

In May 2026, the HSE reported that Streamline Shipping Agencies Limited was fined £146,700 after a worker was seriously injured by a forklift truck. The site already had measures in place. They were not enough. The case is one of a run of recent prosecutions where pedestrians and vehicles were not adequately separated during loading operations, and where the injuries that followed were serious and lasting.

If you run an H&S function in manufacturing or logistics, that gap between 'we have a plan' and 'someone still got hurt' is the part worth sitting with. A painted walkway and a written procedure are controls. They are not barriers, and they do not act when a forklift driver reverses with a blind spot and a pedestrian steps into the line at the wrong second.

Recent cases, one pattern

The Streamline prosecution is not an outlier. Across the last two years, UK manufacturing and logistics sites have faced repeated HSE prosecutions for forklift injuries tied to inadequate vehicle and pedestrian separation. The fines run high and the injuries run permanent.

• •A plastics manufacturer was fined after an employee suffered multiple leg fractures, according to an HSE press release published on 14 November 2024.
• •Streamline Shipping Agencies Limited was fined £146,700 after a worker was seriously injured by a forklift truck, as reported by the HSE on 28 May 2026.
• •A Castleford firm was fined after a man was crushed to death by a forklift, reported by the BBC on 4 December 2025, one of several recent cases where failings in site organisation and segregation led to fatal or life-changing outcomes.

What the law actually requires

HSE guidance on workplace transport is explicit: traffic routes should be organised so that pedestrians and vehicles can circulate safely, and routes should be separated wherever it is reasonably practicable. Where vehicles operate close to people on foot, the guidance points to physical barriers rather than reliance on a painted line. The L117 Approved Code of Practice for rider-operated lift trucks covers operator training, supervision and safe use, but training is a procedural control.

The hierarchy the guidance describes puts physical segregation above signage and behaviour. Industry bodies including BITA set out the same order of priority, separating people from materials handling equipment before relying on signage and procedure. The cases above are what happens when the order gets reversed.

Where barriers stop and intervention begins

Physical barriers are the right starting point, and they are not all equal. Polymer systems tested to PAS 13:2017 absorb impact through elastic deformation and recover their shape, where steel takes a permanent bend and transmits force into the floor fixings. Comparisons of steel and polymer barriers note that polymer systems can cost more upfront, but argue that lower maintenance and faster reconfiguration improve total cost of ownership in high-traffic areas.

Here is the limit that the prosecutions expose. A barrier protects a fixed boundary. A traffic plan describes intended behaviour. Neither acts in the half-second when a reversing forklift and a worker on foot occupy the same space during loading, which is precisely the kind of scenario behind these cases. Most site cameras do not help either, because they record for review after an incident lands rather than intervening before it does.

This is the gap active safety is built for. SAIFI Edge uses computer vision to watch the shared zones, the crossings and the loading areas in real time. When it identifies a vehicle-pedestrian conflict or an exclusion-zone breach, it triggers a physical intervention: closing a gate, dropping a barrier, projecting a warning or sounding an alarm. It does not replace the banksman, the yellow lines or the training. It catches what they inevitably miss on a long shift, in poor light, during a concurrent operation when attention is split.

What to take to your safety committee

• ✓Map every point where forklifts pass close to pedestrians, with particular focus on loading and trailer operations.
• ✓Confirm physical barriers, not paint alone, protect those points, and that they are specified to PAS 13:2017.
• ✓Check whether your shared crossings and loading zones, where fixed barriers cannot cover the geometry, have any control that acts in real time.
• ✓Review whether your existing cameras intervene or merely record; if they only record, identify what closes the gap before an incident.
• ✓Stress-test your traffic plan against the Streamline scenario: measures existed there, and the separation still failed.