Deregulation Bill

Debate between Gordon Marsden and Eilidh Whiteford

Monday 23rd June 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Marsden]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right; it is an iterative process, which simply exposes the weakness of the Minister’s argument.

[Dr Whiteford]

The hon. Gentleman is making a strong case. I commend him for bringing amendment 1 to the Floor of the House, because in a context where it is increasingly difficult for families to get the legal aid that they need to take such things forward, it should not be left to them to launch their own investigations. It is an extremely costly, difficult and distressing process.

[Mr Marsden]

The hon. Lady makes an absolutely valid point. Context is all, particularly in this case, which was crucial to the duty being put into law. MV Derbyshire sank in 1980 and was found only in 1994. That example prompted reinvestigation many years after the original incident.

The duty that the Government want to scrap was used in 1998 to reopen the formal investigation into the loss of the Derbyshire in September 1980. The Derbyshire disappeared south of Japan during Typhoon Orchid. All on board—42 crew and two passengers, who were wives of crew members—lost their lives. She remains the largest UK ship ever to have been lost at sea.

A major union-funded search for the vessel in the 1990s, supported by the International Transport Workers Federation—a global organisation, with affiliates in Britain, including the RMT, Unite, the National Union of Seamen, Nautilus International and the Transport Salaried Staffs Association and broader support from the Public and the Commercial Services Union, the Communication Workers Union, the GMB and others—was required to make that breakthrough in discovering the wreck of the Derbyshire. That effort identified the wreck in 1994 and led to the introduction of the duty in the 1995 Act to establish the necessary evidence and place the legal obligation on the Government to reopen the investigation.

After nearly 20 years of campaigning, the investigation into the cause of the loss was reopened in 1998, and great credit for that decision goes not just to the organisations I mentioned but to my hon. Friend the Member for Garston and Halewood (Maria Eagle), who galvanised the local campaign and ran an all-party group on the subject, and of course to John, now Lord Prescott, who, as Secretary of State for Transport, invoked the powers for the reinvestigation because he drew on his awareness of the struggle that unions and families had undertaken to find the missing ship. He has recently described the Government’s attempt to remove the duty as a massive insult to those who campaigned for the truth about the Derbyshire.

The steadfast way in which the friends and family group that set up the campaign, based in and around Liverpool, and the poignant memories brought back by the 20th anniversary this year of the finding of the ship testify to the huge importance of the power to reinvestigate, not just to find out new facts but, as the hon. Member for Banff and Buchan (Dr Whiteford) said, to support and recognise the loss of those who were affected. All this has been reflected in the wording of amendment 1.

The reinvestigation absolved the crew of any blame for the loss of the vessel and led to significant improvements in the safe operation of bulk carrier class ships and the understanding of typhoon conditions. For those reasons, the claim made in Committee by the Solicitor-General, who is not in his place, that if a wreck is discovered many years after an accident, safety insights would be irrelevant or out of date, really does not hold water. That argument was disproved by the case of the Derbyshire. Maritime accidents may be relatively rare, but they are tragic events and it is crucial to understand them as fully as we can.

Although it relates to a different mode of transport, the recent search for the Malaysian flight MH370 demonstrates that even in today’s technologically advanced world there are circumstances in which even our greatest efforts struggle to match the vastness of the oceans our ships and planes traverse. Who knows when future evidence on that incident will emerge as to the plane’s final fate? It might take months, years or even decades.