Posthouse faces law action after lift death

A woman is planning to take legal action against Granada Compass's Forte hotel division after her lift-engineer husband was electrocuted while working on a fault at the Posthouse Manchester Airport.

Anne Bell became concerned when her husband Laurence Bell failed to return home from repairing a broken lift at the hotel on the evening of 24 May last year.

His body was found in the motor room the next morning, 10 hours after he had last been seen alive.

The main electricity supply had been switched off, but Bell is believed to have knelt on a piece of equipment with a separate isolation point that had not been properly turned off.

After a jury at a Manchester inquest returned a verdict of accidental death, his widow said she planned to take legal action against the hotel and the company her husband worked for.

"I am very upset that the hotel did not realise what had happened there for about 10 hours and that I was the person who had to raise the alarm from home," she said.

A spokesman for Forte said Bell, a trained and experienced lift engineer working for Otis, had not registered his arrival with the hotel's contractor registration system.

"The safety and welfare of guests, employees and sub-contractors working on site are primary concerns of the Forte hotel group," he said.

He added: "Full investigations are launched whenever an incident is reported."