On 6 August 2020, a domestic loft conversion on Springfield Road in Windsor collapsed. Supporting timbers and steel beams had been taken out while work on a chimney breast was still incomplete, and no temporary propping was in place. The gable wall gave way into the building, destroyed the first floor and seriously injured three workers.
The builder, Jack Savva, 70, of Wraysbury in Surrey, pleaded guilty to breaching Regulation 19(1) of the Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2015. At Reading Crown Court on 17 September 2025 he received a 13-month custodial sentence suspended for two years, and was ordered to pay £2,000 compensation to the homeowner. The Health and Safety Executive found he had failed to ensure the structure did not collapse while it was in a state of temporary weakness.
Why the homeowner carried the loss
The part of this case that should concern anyone having work done at home is what happened afterwards. The builder's public liability insurance was not valid at the time of the collapse. That left the homeowner personally facing a bill of around £200,000 to rebuild their own house.
This is the gap most people never think about. A criminal prosecution punishes the contractor. It does not repair your building. The only thing that repairs your building is a live insurance policy, and by the time you find out whether it was live, the wall is already on the floor.
The point where domestic jobs go wrong
Loft conversions, chimney breast removals, knock-throughs and rear openings all have the same shape: for a period of days or weeks, the building is deliberately held up by something other than the thing that normally holds it up. That interim arrangement is called temporary works, and it is where the serious failures cluster.
It rarely fails because someone is reckless. It fails because a sequence slips, a delivery is late, a trade turns up early, and something gets removed a day before the thing that was meant to replace it arrives. Nobody in the room questions it because everyone assumes somebody else has.
- What is currently carrying the load above this opening?
- Who designed the propping, and is there a drawing or a calculation for it?
- What has to be complete before the next element comes out?
- Who checks the props are still correct after the weekend?
Where we fit — and where we do not
PRAVISE is not a firm of structural engineers. We do not design temporary works, we do not produce calculations and we do not sign off a propping scheme. When a job needs that, our advice is to go and get it from someone qualified to give it.
What we do is the layer above that, which on domestic jobs is very often missing entirely. We vet the contractor before they start: company details, references, and confirmation that the public liability and any other cover is genuinely in force, in the right name, for the right value, on the dates of your job. We read the quote and the programme and sense-check the sequence — asking, in plain terms, what holds the house up at each stage and whether a designer has been involved where one should be.
It is an experienced fresh pair of eyes on a job where everyone else is either doing the work or paying for it. Most of the time we confirm the builder has it right, which is a perfectly good outcome and worth knowing.
For builders, not against them
Nothing here is an argument that small builders are the problem. The overwhelming majority of the loft conversions done in Kent this year will be built properly by people who have done a hundred of them. A prosecution like this hurts them too — it hardens insurers, it makes clients suspicious, and it drags the trade's reputation down with it.
A builder who can show a valid certificate of insurance, a sensible sequence and a designer's name against the temporary works wins work. We would far rather help a contractor demonstrate that than pick over the aftermath of a collapse.
If you are about to start something structural
Ask for the insurance certificate and check the dates and the limit. Ask who has designed the temporary support. Ask what happens to the sequence if a steel is late. Then get one person who is not being paid by the outcome to look over the answers.
Case details verified against the public HSE prosecution record on 31 August 2026: HSE press release, 29 September 2025.
This article draws on reputable published sources and public enforcement reporting. It has not been fully verified case by case, so no individuals, companies or addresses are identified.
This article is general guidance, not advice about your particular site or premises. If you want it applied to your own job, the first call is free.