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London Bridge Rail Crash
Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.--[Mr. Allen.]
1.32 am
Sir John Stanley (Tonbridge and Malling): I suppose that it is inevitable that the seriousness with which rail accidents are treated depends partly on whether there has been serious injury or loss of life. In some rail accidents, mercifully, there is no loss of life or serious injury, but those accidents nevertheless deserve to be treated every bit as seriously as those in which there have been casualties.
The London Bridge rail accident, on 8 January 1999, falls into the latter category. Although, miraculously, no one was killed or injured, the accident was, by any yardstick, extremely serious. It exposed--not for the first time--the serious flaws still present in our rail safety system.
The accident involved two commuter trains--a Thameslink train and a Connex train--that converged, in the evening rush hour, on the same line on a viaduct, as a consequence of the Connex train going through a red light. Nine of the 16 coaches were derailed, and almost 300 passengers were put at risk.
There is little doubt that, with a slightly different point of impact, at slightly higher speed, with the possibility of one or more of the coaches being toppled over the viaduct down into Spa road, we could have had on our hands a human catastrophe every bit as serious as the appalling Paddington rail crash of a few weeks ago. Yet, despite the immense seriousness of the accident, the response both of the rail companies and of the Health and Safety Executive in putting information into the public domain has been lamentably inadequate.
The three rail companies, Railtrack, Connex and Thameslink, have conducted what they describe as an "internal industry investigation". On 14 January, six days after the accident, I wrote to the then chairman of Railtrack, Sir Robert Horton, asking for a copy of the report when it was available. Today, exactly 10 months after the accident, I am still waiting for that report. Worse still, Railtrack has now told me that it does not intend to publish the full report, and may not publish anything at all.
Last Thursday, 4 November, Railtrack wrote to me as follows:
The performance of the Health and Safety Executive has been no better. I have been pressing Ministers at the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions for months to ensure that the full HSE account
of the accident was put into the public domain. Yet, on 5 October, I received a letter from the Minister for Transport, Lord Macdonald, which said:
The House will appreciate from the date of that letter that it could not have been more appallingly timed. On the very day that Lord Macdonald was sending it to me, the Paddington rail disaster, as a result of which 31 people so far have lost their lives, took place.
Following receipt of that letter, I wrote to the Secretary of State for the Environment, Transport and the Regions; I believe that it was the most vehement letter that I have written to any Minister on any subject in my 25 years in the House. I said that Lord Macdonald's reply was unacceptable, and that the Secretary of State must reverse the decision of his junior Minister and of the Health and Safety Executive not to publish a separate report into the London Bridge rail accident.
The Secretary of State, to his credit, did precisely as I asked and reversed the decision. As a result, on 27 October, the HSE finally published a pretty thin three- and-a-half-page accident report. The Secretary of State's reply to me read:
I said that the three-and-a-half page report published by the HSE was thin, and one critical piece of information has yet to be disclosed. We were told that the cause of the London Bridge accident was that the driver of the Connex train went through a red light at nearly 40 mph. It turns out that the same driver had previously taken another train through a red light six months earlier. We have been told that the reason why the train went through the red light was "human error", but that is not an adequate explanation. The travelling public are entitled to know what explanation was given by the driver of the Connex train as to why he went through the red light. Was he unsighted? If so, why? Was he distracted in some way? If so, how? Was he suffering from some lack of concentration? If so, why? The travelling public are entitled to know what explanation the driver gave for going through the red light, having previously gone through both a double yellow light and a single yellow light. I have given the Minister prior notice of that question, among others, and I hope that he will answer it when he replies to the debate.
Mr. Simon Hughes (Southwark, North and Bermondsey):
The right hon. Gentleman knows that the accident to which he refers was in my constituency. Has he asked the HSE to answer the following questions? Has it in the past had occasion to report on similar accidents with a similar breach of the rules--the passing of red
Sir John Stanley:
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for raising those two points. They are pertinent and I shall address the latter question in a moment.
I shall now deal with the issue of prosecutions for the London Bridge crash. There are two potential prosecuting authorities--the Crown Prosecution Service and the railway inspectorate, which is part of the HSE. I have been in correspondence with both bodies and I have been staggered by the replies that I have received. The reply that I received from the Director of Public Prosecutions, Mr. David Calvert-Smith, read:
So here we have a very serious accident, in which 300 people were put at risk, but in respect of which police reports were not submitted to the Crown Prosecution Service or to the railway inspectorate. That leads me to the matter of prosecution policy in relation to rail accidents. Frankly, I am baffled. It is apparent that one prosecution policy applies to the road system, and that a completely different policy applies to the railways.
As the House knows, motorists get prosecuted every day of the week for going through red lights. However, it seems that going through a red light on the railway system confers almost complete immunity from prosecution in almost any circumstance, even though the risk of large-scale loss of life is substantially greater.
An extremely interesting article on prosecution policy by the Health and Safety Executive appeared inThe Independent on 16 October. It began by stating:
Finally, I shall deal with future train safety measures in the light of the London Bridge crash. The rail safety regulations introduced in August this year require Railtrack and the rail operating companies to introduce a train protection system throughout the rail network by the end of 2003. That is more than four years from now--far too slow and leisurely a time scale to bring about the critically important improvements needed in the rail safety system.
"Railtrack will be producing a summary of our internal investigation report and this should be available by the end of the year, subject to legal scrutiny and the agreement of the other parties concerned."
The railway companies seem to have been more concerned about protecting themselves from litigation than with making themselves accountable to the travelling public. The report should have been published in full months ago. There has been a reprehensible failure of public accountability by the railway companies concerned.
"HSE will not be publishing a separate accident investigation report".
Apparently, all that would be made available was a press notice.
"It is not the practice of the Health and Safety Executive to issue a separate public report except in the most serious of accidents."
If that is the HSE's policy, it should be radically changed. It is simply not acceptable that the HSE should publish separate accident reports only when there is, effectively, loss of life in rail accidents. The Secretary of State for the Environment, Transport and the Regions must now instruct the HSE to bring about a basic change in policy so that, after any rail accident involving a serious risk to members of the public, a separate accident report is published.
"You ask whether papers have been submitted to the Crown Prosecution Service in relation to this accident and whether a prosecution is under consideration. To date we have received no papers from the police."
The reply I received from the chief executive of the HSE, Miss Jenny Bacon, was similar:
"You also ask whether we have received relevant papers from the police. Railway Inspectorate took charge of the investigation a few hours after the accident. The police involvement was limited and to our knowledge they did not produce a detailed report."
"The Health and Safety Executive brought prosecutions over just one train accident last year, during which the number of 'significant' accidents increased to 104, a jump of nearly 15 per cent."
In the wake of the Paddington disaster, the Secretary of State for the Environment, Transport and the Regions said that he was considering removing safety responsibilities from Railtrack. In the light of the HSE's approach to prosecutions, I wonder whether the right hon. Gentleman should consider removing prosecution responsibilities for rail accidents from the HSE and transferring them to the Crown Prosecution Service. That would at least ensure a far greater degree of consistency between prosecutions on the road system and prosecutions on the rail system.
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