A COMPANY was fined £80,000 today for health and safety failures at a hotel that burned to the ground, killing three people.

O&C Holdsworth failed to ensure fire detectors and alarms were working at its Penhallow Hotel in Newquay, Cornwall, or make an adequate risk assessment before the fire in August 2007.

The hotel was being managed by Andy Woollam, a former Pleckgate High School pupil who lived in Blackburn and Great Harwood before moving to Cornwall.

In addition eight people from across East Lancashire were staying at the hotel on a trip booked through Robinsons Holidays, based in Great Harwood.

They had to flee the flames in terror.

The blaze was later described by firefighters as the worst hotel fire in Britain for 40 years.

Monica Hughes, 86, her 43-year-old son Peter, and 80-year-old Joan Harper were unable to escape the blaze.

Mr Hughes, a teacher from Cheslyn Hay, Staffordshire, jumped from a third-floor window after trying in vain to save his mother.

Ms Harper, of Stoke-on-Trent, was also trapped, while her twin sister Marjorie Brys was one of more than 90 people who escaped the four-storey hotel.

Truro Crown Court heard yesterday that the company had been warned about inadequate equipment more than a year before the fire.

But the firm placed the blame on the hotel manager and a health and safety specialist it said failed to pass the warning to directors.

John Hughes, Mrs Hughes' son and Peter's brother, was very critical of the fine.

"To say I am disappointed with it is an understatement. It is a travesty," he said after the hearing.

"It should have been at least £500,000 in my estimation.”

Passing sentence, Judge Christopher Paul Darlow said there had been a ‘systemic failure’ by the firm to make sure its chain of hotels in southern England had complied with regulations.

An inquest into the deaths in 2009 returned open verdicts on all three victims, despite hearing evidence that arson was the most likely cause of the fire.