from Sunday Herald, 22 February 2009
The inquiry into the Stockline disaster in Glasgow will fail to learn vital lessons because it has been restricted to the immediate cause of the gas explosion, experts are warning.
The inquiry’s chair, Lord Gill, barred academics who authored a report on the wider causes of the accident from appearing as witnesses because he regarded their evidence as outwith the inquiry’s remit.
The experts from Stirling, Strathclyde and Liverpool universities had concerns about the entire regulatory regime governing the ICL Plastics factory, which was flatten by an explosion on 11 May 2004, killing nine workers and injuring 33 more.
In a report published in September 2007, the experts argued that the root causes of the accident lay in the factory’s long record of breaching safety rules and cutting corners to save money. They also attacked the government’s Health and Safety Executive for failing to crack down on the breaches.
But despite repeatedly offering to give evidence to the inquiry, which ran from July to November last year, they were never called. An eleventh-hour email offering to appear on the inquiry’s final day was inexplicably mislaid until after the inquiry had finished.
A former worker at the factory, Laurence Connelly, was also barred from appearing. He wanted to draw attention to the factory’s failure to protect workers from toxic chemicals.
One of the experts was professor Andrew Watterson, head of the occupational and environmental health research group at the University of Stirling. He accepted that no-one wanted a protected and pointlessly costly inquiry.
“But a superficial inquiry that fails to examine the root causes of explosions such as that at ICL/Stockline, however rapidly and cheaply it is done, could prove a waste of both public money and time and valuable lessons could be lost,” he said.
“Immediate events that led up to the explosion and actions that reveal systemic failures that were responsible for the disaster both need thorough examination.”
Watterson argued that management and regulatory failures made accidents more likely. Other inquiries into similar disasters had investigated these kind of issues, he said.
He described the inquiry’s failure to notice the crucial email from the expert group as “remarkably odd and very unfortunate”. It was “astonishing” that it took five days to draw the email to the attention of Lord Gill.
Jim McCourt, another of the report’s authors from the West of Scotland Hazards Group, argued that the inquiry had missed a vital opportunity. “We are disappointed that the inquiry saw fit to exclude all report authors and the workers who took part in the interviews in the report,” he said.
“We have no doubt that the remit of the public inquiry, as set out, could have legitimately included these people who were fully prepared to appear.” The failure to call Laurence Connelly in particular was “inexplicable”, he added.
“We needed the inquiry to ensure that lessons are learned to ensure that people are safer in their workplace. At a time when the Health and Safety Executive is downsizing and ‘light touch’ regulation is being advocated, we had a chance to examine closely events leading up to the disaster.”
In a statement the inquiry secretariat pointed out that it was up to Lord Gill to interpret the terms of reference he had been given by ministers. Repeated invitations to the experts and Connolly to submit evidence within those terms had not been taken up.
However, Lord Gill had read the expert report and the evidence submitted by Connelly and taken them into account. The ‘core participants’ of the inquiry, which included the bereaved relatives, had not called the experts as witnesses.
The inquiry secretariat admitted that there had been a problem over the lost email. “It was missed for technical reasons that cannot be explained and an apology was issued,” said its statement.
“The academics have been given every opportunity to put forward what further evidence they have. There is no conspiracy here.”
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