Yates v National Trust - William Norris QC, Thirty Nine Essex Street
09/03/14. Jamie Yates was 22 and was working as a tree surgeon for Joe Jackman – trading as Joe Jackman and Sons – when on 4th December 2009, he fell some 50 feet from a tree and suffered catastrophic injuries. The accident happened in Morden Hall Park, where Mr Jackman had been engaged to carry out various tree felling jobs for the owners and occupiers, the National Trust (NT).
At the time of his accident, Mr Yates had been working for Mr Jackman for about 2 years. He was always self-employed but worked under the direction of Mr Jackman and on Mr Jackman’s contracts. Mr Jackman himself had been introduced to the NT over 2 years previously when he had been carrying out work for one of the NT tenants on the property. He always represented that his contracts would be performed by ‘experienced and fully qualified arborists’ – though whether the job in question (felling a large chestnut in sections) required greater paper qualifications than Mr Yates (and, indeed, Mr Jackman) actually possessed was controversial.
Mr Yates’s case, in a nutshell, was that he was too inexperienced and/or insufficiently trained and supervised to be doing what he was. He argued that this should have been...
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