A Preventable Death: Part II
Kenneth Roy
Simon Fuller and Angus Skinner
A BBC reporter, James Cook, filing a despatch from the scene of the Lanark school bus crash on 31 March 2010, said to camera: ‘The question being asked is why was this bus allowed to travel at all this morning? The weather conditions were terrible. They remain terrible’. Three years later, in her judgement following a fatal accident inquiry into the crash, Sheriff Nikola Stewart has failed to address this, the central question, far less answer it.
James Cook articulated the popular feeling that day. Iain Heggison, who lives 150 yards from the crash site, was among the first on the scene around 5.45am. ‘It was pitch dark, blowing a total blizzard, a whiteout,’ he told journalists. He saw screaming, bleeding children form a human chain to help each other to safety. Mr Heggison’s first thought when he heard where the bus had been heading – Alton Towers, 250 miles away in Staffordshire – was to ask himself: ‘Why could they not have cancelled it?’
The deep concerns of all those in the Lanark area, and the wider Scottish community, who expressed astonishment and dismay at the decision to go ahead with the trip are nowhere reflected in Sheriff Stewart’s determination. Mr Heggison, the eye-witness, did not give evidence at the inquiry, presumably because he was not called to do so. Some of the Daily Record’s questions remain unanswered; the wall of silence has been penetrated with only limited success. And now we have the last legal word on the subject – a highly unsatisfactory one.
Sheriff Stewart has somehow found it possible to write her judgement without mentioning, for example, that Strathclyde Police had specifically warned drivers in the area not to travel unless their journey was absolutely necessary or that the Met Office had been warning of severe weather for four days before it struck: four days in which a decision could and should have been taken to cancel the trip. The Met Office should have been asked by the court for its expert opinion. Evidently it wasn’t.
The sheriff has blamed the driver for approaching the bridge too fast and the dead schoolgirl, Natasha Paton, for not wearing a seatbelt. But she refuses to accept – or even to contemplate – that the organisers of the trip were much more culpable in ignoring the advice of the Met Office and the police. It almost beggars belief that her report contains no discussion of the wisdom – or otherwise – of proceeding with the trip. On the contrary, the sheriff is at pains to exonerate the school and the education authority:
Whilst the poor and deteriorating weather conditions undoubtedly played a role in the accident and the difficulties associated with its immediate aftermath, no criticism was or should be levelled at any of those responsible for organising and supervising the trip that morning in respect of any failure to adequately prepare for or respond to weather conditions.
Where on earth is the justification for this vote of confidence in the local establishment?
If the principal critics of the fatal misadventure were not called as witnesses at the inquiry, it would of course be possible to conclude that ‘no criticism’ had been levelled. But Sheriff Stewart, in reaching this conclusion, may have been misinformed on one important point. She makes the confident assertion that ‘no parent or guardian engaged in delivering their children to meet the coach at Lanark Grammar School expressed any concern to teachers or supervising adults about undertaking the trip in the prevailing weather conditions or withdrew their child from the trip as a result of such concerns’.
This statement should not pass unchallenged. There were 39 sixth year pupils on the bus that morning; but there should have been 40. Adam Thornton, who had been booked to go, pulled out at 4am, an hour before the bus was due to leave, after a discussion with his mother Susan about the advisability of the trip. Susan, a driving instructor, had experienced the conditions for herself on a journey back from Glasgow on Tuesday night.
She looked out the window in the early hours of Wednesday and noted that conditions had further deteriorated. ‘I wish somebody had had the sense to make the decision not to go in that weather,’ she told the BBC. ‘It was just not the weather to be out on the roads at all’.
Some time after the crash, Susan and Adam Thornton received a visit from the police and gave statements. The police told them that they would ‘very likely’ be called as witnesses at the fatal accident inquiry. They weren’t. It was the last they heard.
When we spoke to Susan Thornton two days ago and put the sheriff’s statement to her, she told us that, in the aftermath of the crash, she had become cynical about bureaucracy. She supposed that it could always be claimed by the authorities that she had not forbidden her son from going on the trip; that he had made the decision himself or that they had made it jointly. If Susan Thornton is correct in her interpretation, that would leave the sheriff’s declaration just about intact – though extremely wobbly. Since Susan had first-hand knowledge of the conditions overnight, it is one of the many strange features of the case that her expert testimony as a driving instructor was not thought important enough to be sought.
We have a further question that is unlikely to be answered. The Met Office says that, on Tuesday 30 March, its forecast for Scotland was so bad that it felt obliged to alert officials at the Scottish Government to the seriousness of the situation. What did these officials do with this information? Did they ever communicate it to local education authorities to enable rational decisions to be made about school trips?
We have been covering this case in the Scottish Review since the day of the accident. We were unhappy then. We are unhappier now. Here’s why.
The delay of two years eight months before the fatal accident inquiry finally began at Lanark Sheriff Court last November was inexcusable.
When we criticised the sheriff’s decision to go on holiday in April with her report still unwritten, the attempt by a civil servant, acting on the sheriff’s behalf, to force us into a retraction was inexcusable.
The use of Twitter by a public agency (the Scottish Court Service) to undermine the Scottish Review’s legitimate reporting, when we had already offered the Scottish Court Service a right of reply in the magazine, was inexcusable.
The sheriff’s unwillingness in her judgement to acknowledge the credible opposition to the school’s action in going ahead with the trip is inexcusable. Her blanket exoneration of those in positions of power without giving adequate reasons – that too is inexcusable.
Encouraged by this judgement, teachers will continue to feel entitled to take their students on 19-hour, 500-mile round trips to theme parks, in the most treacherous conditions, without threat of rebuke. In a recent editorial we called for justice – justice for Natasha Paton, who died a few days before her 18th birthday. There is, in this perverse outcome, no justice. Scotland’s discredited system of fatal accident inquiries looks shabbier than ever.
What will be done? The sad answer is: probably nothing.
Click here for Part I of A Preventable Death
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