News

RPSA Council member Stephen McCarron is recovering from a broken leg and a broken ankle after the locking pins on his telescopic ladder released and the ladder collapsed beneath him. The Association has published new guidance for members, and is asking anyone who has experienced a ladder failure to report it.

One of our Council members, Stephen McCarron, has been seriously injured in a fall at height. Stephen’s telescopic ladder collapsed while he was using it, and he sustained a broken leg and a broken ankle. He faces a long recovery. Everyone at RPSA sends him our very best wishes, and we look forward to having him back with us.

Accidents happen, and no amount of care eliminates risk entirely. What makes this one worth every member’s attention is how it happened. It was Stephen’s own ladder; it was a telescopic ladder, and his account is that the locking pins released together so that the ladder simply concertinaed beneath him.

If you use a telescopic ladder, that description deserves a moment of your time. The locking pins are the only thing holding the ladder up. Each section is held by a pair of spring-loaded pins seated into the section below, and on a thirteen rung ladder there may be two dozen of them carrying your entire body weight. When they release together the ladder does not sag or creak in warning. It drops through its own length in an instant, with you on it, and there is nothing left at the height where your hands were.

We should be clear about what we do and do not know. We know what Stephen experienced. We do not know why the pins let go, and there are explanations that would not involve a fault in the ladder at all. We are not going to speculate about it.

What we can say is that telescopic ladders as a category have a documented problem. The Ladder Association, working with Trading Standards and an accredited test laboratory, has now run three rounds of market surveillance. In the first, only three of seventeen ladders tested passed the safety critical tests taken from the product standard, and more than half of those that failed were marked or sold as compliant. In the most recent study, published in October 2025, fourteen of eighteen samples failed.

That last study contains one finding every member should know. All fourteen of the ladders bought from third-party sellers operating through online marketplaces failed. All four bought directly from the retailer passed. B&Q appears on both sides of that result: ladders bought through its marketplace from third-party sellers failed, and ladders bought directly from B&Q passed. Same brand, same website, different seller, opposite outcome.

The samples per retailer were small, so this is an indication rather than a measured failure rate, and it is not a reason to skip checking a ladder you have bought from anyone. But if you are buying a replacement, look at the sold by line on the page before you order. On this evidence it tells you more than the price, the reviews or the label.

We are not suggesting every telescopic ladder is dangerous, and we are not naming any product. We are saying that no surveyor should assume their ladder is sound simply because it came from a name they recognise and carries a label.

What we are asking members to do

1. Read the new guidance. HS-02, Telescopic Ladders, Work at Height and the Surveyor’s Duty of Care, is available now in the members area. It covers how these ladders fail, what BS EN 131-6 actually requires, your legal duties as a self-employed surveyor, and what to do if a ladder fails. It includes a printable pre-use check card, an inspection register and the reporting form mentioned below.
2. Check your ladder before your next inspection. Extend it fully and work along every locking mechanism in turn, confirming that each one engages and shows that it has engaged. Look for the EN 131-6 marking, which is the standard written specifically for telescopic ladders, and check that the base widens if it extends to three metres or more, usually by way of a stabiliser bar. If anything is bent, loose, cracked or sticky, take it out of use.
3. Tell us if your ladder has failed. If you have had a telescopic ladder collapse, slip, buckle or unlock unexpectedly, at any time, we want to know the make, the model, where and roughly when you bought it, and what happened. Use the reporting form at Appendix C of HS-02 in the members area, or simply email us at info@rpsa.org.uk. Historic failures are just as useful to us as recent ones.
4. Report it to the people with legal powers too. A report to RPSA lets us warn members. A report to Trading Standards, through the Citizens Advice consumer helpline, is what gets a product investigated and removed from sale. The Ladder Association also takes reports of unsafe ladders and feeds them into the surveillance programme described above.

If the reports we receive show a pattern, we will alert members and pass the evidence to the bodies that have the power to act on it.

Falls from height remain the single most common cause of fatal injury at work in Great Britain, accounting for 31 of the 126 worker deaths recorded in 2025/26. For a profession whose most routine high-risk task is putting a ladder up to a loft hatch, that is not an abstract statistic.

Andrew McColl, Chairman, Residential Property Surveyors Association