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Mr. Jonathan Shaw (Chatham and Aylesford): I am grateful for this opportunity to take part in the debate and to make my maiden speech.
The armed services and the defence industry have long associations with my constituents, particularly those in the Medway towns and in the Royal British Legion village in Aylesford. The new seat of Chatham and Aylesford is drawn from the old Mid-Kent and Tonbridge and Malling constituencies. It encapsulates much of the rich variety that characterises Kent. The seat contains both urban and rural areas and important industries that have grown up around the River Medway.
My two predecessors are highly regarded hon. Members, and both have deserved reputations as hard-working constituency Members. The right hon. Member for Tonbridge and Malling (Sir J. Stanley) is a distinguished former Minister of State for the Armed Forces. He and I joined forces in a battle to seek noise mitigation measures for our constituents who live alongside the M20. The hon. Member for Faversham and Mid-Kent (Mr. Rowe) is my former Member of Parliament. He is independently minded, and we share an interest in the welfare of young people and in opportunities for them, particularly for those from disadvantaged backgrounds. An example of the hon. Gentleman's interest in young people became apparent to me recently, because when I was going through some old papers I discovered a letter from him wishing me a happy 18th birthday. Furthermore, in the letter he invited me to meet him at the Conservative club in Medway for coffee. The meeting was to be held in the Thatcher room. I politely declined his offer.
The royal dockyard in Chatham has long been at the heart of the Medway towns. Its closure in 1984 is well recorded and it is a credit to the local people that despite the inevitable pain that the closure caused, the dockyard has not died, but has been transformed. Part of it is now a thriving business community with new housing and leisure facilities, and the oldest part is an 80-acre historic dockyard. It is a popular, award-winning tourist attraction drawing more than 100,000 visitors a year. We were delighted to be visited recently by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport. During his visit, he announced a much needed £16 million cash injection from the national lottery and other sources.
Much of the excellent work that has led to the rebirth of the historic dockyard is attributable to the hard work of Admiral of the Fleet, Sir William Staveley, the chairman of the historic dockyard. Tragically, he died just a couple of weeks ago. Sir William was the flag officer at Medway from 1959 to 1961, and had a distinguished military career, which culminated in 1985 in his appointment as First Sea Lord and Chief of Naval Staff. I had the pleasure and honour to spend a morning and have lunch with him shortly after the visit by my right hon. Friend. His enthusiasm, energy and commitment were always evident.
We have lost a great champion, a man of great stature and vision, but it is perhaps some comfort to know that he secured for the historic dockyard the future for which he had fought so hard before his sudden and untimely death. He was a man of great stature, and I am sure that the House would wish to join me in expressing heartfelt condolences to his widow, Lady Staveley, and their children.
Within this debate, we rightly acknowledge and pay tribute to the women and men of our armed services. Having a brother who served in the Blues and Royals Regiment for 18 years, I know the commitment and professionalism that they bring to their jobs, but it is also right to acknowledge the efforts of civilian staff who support our soldiers, sailors, marines and pilots. I wish to use the opportunity of my maiden speech to draw attention to the Chatham dockyard workers who worked on nuclear submarines between 1966 and 1983.
Thousands of jobs were secured in 1965, when the Government announced that Chatham dockyard would become a nuclear refit centre. In 1966, the Chatham Observer, the local paper, quoted dockyard managers as saying that two watchwords would govern the way in which the dockyard was run: safety and absolute care. They said that workers who came into contact with radiation would be checked and rechecked. As is usual practice, the MOD put in place a series of controls and checks to monitor radiation dose exposure and to ensure that exposure of the civilian work force was as low as reasonably practical.
The civilian work force at Chatham dockyard were all fit young men. Indeed, they had to have medicals to prove the case before they were given the go-ahead to work on the nuclear submarines. They were the cream of Medway, as the current mayor of Rochester described them. As the widow of one of the former workers and as an experienced nurse, she is well placed to make such an assessment.
It is estimated that between 2,000 and 3,000 men worked on the submarines between 1966 and 1983. In 1990, some six years after the dockyard was closed, there was growing concern in the Medway towns about the number of former dockyard workers who had contracted one type of cancer or another. Those men were frequently in their 30s and 40s and many had young families.
A campaign then ensued, primarily to persuade the MOD to carry out its duty of care and to provide annual medical checks to any former dockyard worker, as take place for other workers in the nuclear industry. At the head of the campaign was a former dockyard worker, Tim Robson, the late husband of Rochester's mayor, Linda Robson, to whom I referred. Having served his apprenticeship in the dockyard as a boilermaker in the 1970s, he, like many young men, took advantage of the extra pay on offer in the dockyard to work on the nuclear submarines. In the dockyard, two different types of workers were permitted to work on the submarines: classified workers, the mainstay of the operation, and the approved or written scheme workers, who were drafted in for extra help.
A year after he started the campaign to help his fellow dockyard workers, Tim Robson and his family were given the news that he too had cancer--Hodgkin's disease. Despite his illness, he continued his campaign and was overwhelmed with the number of inquiries from ex-workers and their families who were concerned about their health and reporting instances where safety and absolute care were far from being the watchwords.
During its time as a nuclear facility, Chatham was often under pressure. The work on the submarines, to refuel or to decommission them, was frequently behind schedule. What emerged from the campaign was a concern that, because of the pressure, proper monitoring and safety
were not always in place. That is well illustrated in the case of David Spriggs, a refitter on a Dreadnought. He was working deep in the heart of a reactor when a pipe burst above his head and drenched him in water. The supervisor reportedly told him to carry on until the end of the shift, when the Geiger counter showed alarming levels of radiation exposure.
Following the accident, which the MOD called a serious incident, David Spriggs was told to take six months off, yet he was back at work within a couple of weeks because of pressure of work at the dockyard. When operations started, guarantees were given that any worker who had contact with radiation would be checked and checked again. As I said earlier, the watchwords were safety and absolute care. In 1995, David Spriggs died of cancer aged 38. His widow requested his dosage records, which should have been kept if he had had a high level of exposure--even though he was only an approved or written scheme worker--so that she might seek compensation under the scheme for radiation-linked diseases. The MOD informed her that no records could be found. Accordingly, David Spriggs must never have been in that reactor.
Despite a two-year battle to retrieve those records, David Spriggs's widow has yet to make any progress and she is now taking the MOD to court. The witnesses asked to appear are likely to come forward to say that they saw David and can testify that he frequently worked in the reactor compartment in nuclear submarines at Chatham dockyard.
A further concern to us in the Medway towns is that the MOD may not have done all that it could to ensure that all available safety systems were in place at Chatham. It failed to install the new safety system, Modex, an American invention, which was introduced in American yards in the 1960s and early 1970s. It was a significant development in dose abatement technology. According to the Defence Committee report of 1990, it reduces the dose burden within the reactor compartment by a factor of four to eight. As has been said, Modex was introduced at Devonport and Rosyth in about 1979, but it was never installed at Chatham.
Tim Robson, by then a leading local councillor, continued the campaign and won the support of Rochester city council in January 1994. The council used its resources to press the MOD to provide annual health checks for former dockyard workers, so that it would be possible for them to detect at the earliest possible stages whether they had a cancer that could be attributed to radiation exposure.
After years of campaigning, a significant step was taken in June this year, when my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State for Defence launched a local counselling scheme in partnership with Rochester city council. Under that scheme, expert doctors provide advice locally to former workers and their families. Since the scheme was launched, 210 inquiries have been made nationally for dosage records from the MOD, and 94 per cent. of them have come from people who worked at Chatham. That demonstrates the success and importance of a local scheme rather than having to rely on a national one.
On the same day, my hon. Friend announced that the MOD would invest £1 million on improving access to radiation dose records not currently held on computer.
We very much hope that that will speed up the system. We in Medway welcome the Government's positive response to the city council's campaign. It has not been easy to take those two important steps, and I pay tribute to the officers of Rochester city council who have made so much extra effort and dedicated so much time to the campaign. Particular praise must be afforded to Mr. Dennis Holmes, the senior lead officer, without whose endeavours we might not have made the progress that we have.
We need more information to obtain a clearer picture of the safety standards applied, to discover whether they were as stringent as they should have been at Chatham dockyard. We in Medway believe that too many young men who worked on the nuclear submarines have died from cancer. They were not average men, but fit young men, the cream of Medway, as I described them earlier. The campaign is by no means over and there are other issues that must be dealt with in the future, such as the accident records. Will they be made available to assist people to make compensation claims? As for the compensation scheme, is it right that a no fault principle should stand if there is clear evidence of error or neglect?
What happens to the information collated from the counselling scheme? How many other people will discover, as did David Spriggs's widow, that records have not been kept? As for medical screening, we believe that annual medical checks are essential. We should also like research to be undertaken into the types of cancers arising from exposure to radiation.
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