2 Sisters: Former workers sue chicken plant after contracting Covid
Former workers at a poultry factory who claim they caught coronavirus in a mass outbreak at the plant can continue legal action against their former employers.Public Health Wales said there were over 200 confirmed Covid-19 cases linked to the 2 Sisters plant in Llangefni, on Anglesey, in June 2020.The group are suing 2 Sisters Food Group, alleging they contracted Covid-19 as a result of a breach of duty, breach of contract and negligence. Their case was thrown out last year but they have now won a High Court appeal, allowing the case to continue.Lawyers for 2 Sisters previously argued the claimants could not prove how they caught the virus and if it was connected to the factory.
The 2 Sisters factory closed down permanently in March 2023, with the loss of over 700 jobs, after the company said the site was old and needed too much investment to bring it up to standard.During the height of the pandemic in 2020, its site was one of several food processing factories in Wales that experienced outbreaks of Covid-19.At the time, Health Minister Vaughan Gething said officials were looking at the level of risk in the food industry.
Mark Edwards, Glynne Roberts, Nia Williams and Brian Perry worked on the chicken production line and claim they worked "shoulder to shoulder" and all fell ill with the virus that month.As part of their claim, they say Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) at work regulations had not been properly followed.The company accepts the staff worked in close proximity with each other, but denies they were "shoulder to shoulder".The firm said it implemented enhanced hygiene measures at the factory which was temporarily closed on 18 June 2020.
At the start of their legal action, the former employees had not obtained expert medical evidence to support the claim.Their lawyers said occupational health experts and virologists would be asked to give their opinion before the case went to trial.They also said the company should disclose evidence about the outbreak before they could ask for expert opinion to back up the claim.Lawyers for 2 Sisters argued the claimants could not prove when or how they had caught the virus and if it had any connection to the factory.In January 2024 they asked for the case to be struck out at the county court in Caernarfon on the basis that Mr Edwards and the others could not prove the cause of their illness and that their claim was doomed to fail.In July, Judge Wendy Owen ruled there was no real prospect of the claim succeeding without medical evidence and no other compelling reason why the case should go to trial.The judge said the issue of causation and medical opinion was a crucial element which should have already been investigated before proceedings were commenced, and gave a summary judgement against the former workers.
But permission to appeal the case was granted in December 2024 and a hearing before a High Court judge in Cardiff was held in April.In a judgement handed down at the end of May, High Court judge Sir Peter Lane said the summary judgment process was "somewhat draconian in nature" and courts should avoid conducting what has come to be described as a "mini trial" of a case.Sir Peter said Judge Owen "fell into error" in effectively conducting a "mini trial" without the benefit of the evidence that would have been available had the case been allowed to proceed to trial.He found that in a claim where the costs of an expert are likely to be significant, when set against the likely value of the claims, it is "plainly proportionate" for the former workers to have proceeded with the claim in this way.Allowing the appeal, he said the claimants may face "an uphill task" but Judge Owen could not be satisfied the claimants had no real prospect of succeeding.The date for the next hearing is yet to be decided.
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Sky News
43 minutes ago
- Sky News
US warplanes transit through UK: Here's what the flight tracking data shows
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Times
an hour ago
- Times
I'm grieving and I made a mistake, now my £8k inheritance is lost
My mother died recently, which was the last in a sequence of horrible events after the death of my son and my own cancer diagnosis. Mum left me a small inheritance of £8,370 which was sent to my NatWest account. I planned to transfer it to an account that my husband holds with Lloyds so that he could buy a new boiler for our house. We are both pensioners and the money from my mum's estate is a lifeline to us. I made the transfer through my NatWest banking app, but I wasn't thinking clearly when I sent it instead to my Lloyds credit card, which had expired years ago. I know there's no excuse for this error but my mum's death was a dreadful experience. I am also still unwell and undergoing a series of investigations, which I hope goes some way to explain why I wasn't thinking clearly when I sent this payment. I immediately realised that the money had gone to the wrong account and felt sick to my stomach. I was in tears and spoke to NatWest to see if it could retrieve the money from Lloyds. Dealing with various Lloyds call centres has also been an absolute nightmare. I have been promised return calls that never materialise. I have been on hold for hours at a time while the operators vary from being pleasant to rude and impatient. I admit I've become frustrated and tearful at times but I have always explained the background of my situation. I made the mistake 12 days ago and the funds have now disappeared into the ether. No one will tell me where the money is or when I will get it back. I just want the money returned to my NatWest account. The stress of this situation is having a serious affect on my already poor health. I am terrified I won't see this money again, which is sorely and address supplied I was so sorry to hear of the devastating series of events that had turned your life upside down and can totally understand why you were not thinking clearly when you made this payment. Usually when money is sent to an expired account, the payment is retrieved and returned to the source. But your case was slightly different because there was an outstanding debt linked to your old credit card account. You told me this amounted to £60 but you had long forgotten about it. The problem was that this debt had been outstanding for so long that Lloyds had passed the account's history to a debt collection agency. This made it harder for Lloyds to track down the account. Plus, as the account was no longer active it was difficult for it to match your details to the information it had in its system. Thankfully when I stepped in Lloyds found the payment, and a few days later the money was back in your NatWest account. You have now also repaid the £60 debt. I felt that Lloyds should have helped you sooner, instead of leaving you in the lurch and giving you conflicting information at a time of extreme distress. 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You said: 'It's clear that this was resolved as a result of your intervention so I can't thank you enough.' • Read more money advice and tips on investing from our experts I work for a small business that sells memorabilia and over the past five years we have used a company called Bionic to manage our gas and electricity deals. When our contract is coming up for renewal, Bionic sends us quotes from suppliers and arranges the switch on our behalf. We had an email from Bionic last September telling us that our contract with British Gas was ending in May. We decided we would shop around and get our own quotes to see if we could get a better deal. I contacted Bionic online in September to say that we no longer needed its services. The agent said we should wait until the company had sent the next quote before opting out. When we got the quotes later that month, I got back in touch using its webchat service to confirm that we didn't want to go ahead with the renewal. 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I was surprised that Bionic had signed you up to a three-year contract without you agreeing to it, but it explained that its digital renewal service is designed so that, unless a customer gets in touch to opt out, it assumes that they are happy with the quote and automatically signs them up. One Bionic email contained a quote and gave you three days to opt out. Once that deadline was reached, you were then locked into a contract and couldn't cancel. Three days seems like a very small window of time to opt out, which I imagine could catch out some people if they missed an email, yet Bionic said that suppliers can hold prices only for a short time. I also thought it was odd that Bionic finalised your contract eight months before your contract expired. It told me that it buys in bulk up to 12 months in advance and that, because of this, its customers get discounts on deals and are shielded from the price movements in the energy market. But regardless of this, you said you had made it clear that you wanted to cancel before the contract was finalised, so why didn't Bionic act on that? It showed me a transcript of the conversation on September 17 where you said you would like to cancel, but were urged to wait until the latest quotes had come through before confirming that you wanted to opt out. You said there was a subsequent webchat on September 26 where you had confirmed that you wished to cancel, but Bionic claimed it had no record of it. It also said that it has never lost a webchat and told me that it has 'complete and accurate records of all interactions'. • Online antique buyer lost my 91-year-old mum's treasures I could not work out why your version of events was different to Bionic's, but after I stepped in, it agreed to cancel your contract. Bionic said: 'Customers can choose to opt out of our digital renewal service at any time prior to finalisation of a replacement contract. As a gesture of goodwill and a demonstration of our commitment to ensuring customer satisfaction, we are prepared to arrange the cancellation of the replacement contract.' You have now arranged a contract directly with a supplier and said: 'This is the outcome that we wanted, but it is still very frustrating that we had to go through this ordeal in the first place. I believe this would not be resolved without your input, so thank you.' • £868,409 — the amount Your Money Matters has saved readers so far this year If you have a money problem you would like Katherine Denham to investigate email yourmoneymatters@ Please include a phone number
Times
an hour ago
- Times
How can hospitals have dignity if staff don't notice you're dead?
There have been miracles happening at a mental health hospital in the east of London — miracles so remarkable that I am surprised so little has been made of it. What happened at Goodmayes Hospital in Ilford was that a patient died — but then three days later was seen by staff cheerfully eating his breakfast. Extraordinary goings-on, don't you think? Or perhaps, worryingly, not quite as extraordinary as they appear. The man who died and then — stone rolled away from the tomb — was up and about eating his cornflakes three days later was called Mr Winbourne Charles. He had been admitted to Goodmayes suffering from depression, and five months later he killed himself. So how was he seen eating his breakfast three days later? He wasn't. The staff who were meant to be watching him had not even noticed that he had died: they lied on the official forms, not realising that Mr Charles had been in a coffin for the best part of 72 hours. Such was the level of care and concern. Such was the rigour and the attention to detail. • Rod Liddle on his radio comeback: Somehow I'm still on air When Mr Charles was admitted to Goodmayes it was with a clinical psychological assessment which revealed he was a very high-risk patient and should be observed once every 15 minutes. Goodmayes downgraded that assessment so that he should be observed only once an hour. But it didn't really matter, because the staff didn't even do that. It turns out that he hadn't been observed for at least two hours when he was found dead. You might gauge the interest the Goodmayes staff took in their employment, and in the people they were there to care for, by their behaviour at Mr Charles's inquest. One staff member gave evidence lying in their bed at home, because they weren't due at work that day. Another gave evidence from the Tube because they were on their way to the airport to take a nice break in the sun. In my days of court reporting the coroner would have sent round the Old Bill to drag that person from their pit and grounded all flights — but times change. The authority has seeped away. We know about Mr Winbourne Charles partly because of another inquest into another unnecessary death at the same hospital and some expert digging by the BBC, which revealed at least 20 more very dubious deaths at the North East London NHS Foundation Trust. People who had been on short-term medication for years and years. People neglected. The staff not doing what they were paid to do. At Mr Charles's inquest the coroner recorded a verdict of death by suicide contributed to by neglect. The trust accepted the verdict and admitted that the behaviour of its staff at the inquest had been 'unacceptable', and so you might expect things to be changing in Goodmayes right now. You'd be wrong. On the hospital's own site the latest review — from May this year — details the utterly useless nature of the service provided for patients. Underneath it says: 'Goodmayes Hospital has not yet replied' — but then, in fairness, it says that underneath all the reviews, dating back to 2023. Where do we start with this farrago? Perhaps with the nature of management in the public sector, where a laxer atmosphere and regimen prevails than in the private sphere, and where it seems that the ethos is far more about supporting the staff than providing for the customer, or patient. There are no sales figures and financial imperatives to sharpen the concentration a little. The unions are on the side of staff and the managers dare not demur. Nobody is on the side of the patient, the taxpayer. But I do not think that is the main problem. In the past year I have been detailing here the various manifestations of Skank Britain and the cultural shifts that have led us down this fetid back alley. The dissolution of authority and the refusal of people to take responsibility for their own actions, or indeed for themselves. The notion of such terms as 'discipline' and 'duty' becoming de trop and the insistence by each errant individual that he or she mustn't be judged and will behave exactly as they wish, thank you. The almost complete lack of regard for that most annoying of encumbrances, other people. A lack of dignity in the self and towards others. And, perhaps more than anything else, the long-term whittling-away of a communitarian ethos, the sense that as a nation we have a responsibility to look out for one another and to do the right thing. All of that stuff has largely gone, I fear. Goodmayes Hospital is as much a function of Skank Britain as some feral lout on the Tube with his feet on the seats and hideous music blaring out of his infernal device. Two members of Palestine Action broke into RAF Brize Norton and claimed to have put out of action a couple of Voyager air-to air refuelling tankers. Three questions arise. First, why weren't they shot? Second, the prime minister called it an act of vandalism — but isn't it, more properly, an act of treason? And, finally, why hadn't Palestine Action already been put on the list of proscribed terrorist organisations and its members arrested? You will be relieved to know that Olsi Beheluli is still with us. Olsi, an Albanian by birth, has recently been released from prison after an 11-year stretch for heroin dealing. In a move that suggests he is perhaps not the sharpest tool in the box, he photographed himself sitting in front of a vast pile of banknotes worth £250,000. Anyway, the Home Office wanted him out of the country, but the immigration tribunal judges wouldn't have it. In gaining British citizenship, Olsi had signed a form which stated that he had never done anything that 'might indicate that you may not be considered a person of good character'. Dealing skag didn't remotely count. Readers of a certain age may remember the comedian Dave Allen's observation that, as 10 per cent of road accidents were caused by drink-drivers, it followed that 90 per cent were caused by people who were sober. 'Why don't those people keep off the roads and let us drunks drive in safety?' he asked. The dyscalculic lefties will all be channelling Dave, having read about the Ministry of Justice stats released last week which showed that more than a quarter of all sexual assaults on women last year were carried out by people not born in this country. You can hear them now: 'That means 74 per cent were carried out by British people and nobody has suggested investigating them. Racist!'
