Talk given by Maureen Kavanagh

TUC/CCA Conference, 8 July 2002 on
“Law Enforcement and Corporate Accountability”

My name is Maureen Kavanagh and I am here to represent Disaster Action and the Safety on Trains Action Group. Disaster Action is an umbrella organisation, that includes members of family support and campaign groups,, formed after many disasters. These include the Herald of Free Enterprise, Piper Alpha, Kings Cross, Hillsborough, Lockerbie, Marchioness, Southall, Paddington and Clapham Rail Crashes and many more. 

Disaster Action is dedicated to the prevention of further disasters. We want to encourage responsible corporate behaviour. But where organisations fail in their duty of care and are grossly negligent or indifferent to safety, they should be subject to a workable process of law which imposes appropriate penalties on guilty parties.

I started STAG (Safety Trains Action Group) to campaign for rail safety and to change the law on corporate accountability. STAG joined forces with Disaster Action to help further our joint aims and to fight for justice.

Imagine this. You have lost the most important person in your life. You yourself may be disabled, you are severely stressed, and your life is changed forever. Nothing will ever be the same again. There are others who are suffering in the same way and they too may never recover from the same train crash in which you were involved. 

What is it you want? You want to know why and how it could happen. Who was to blame? Could it have been prevented? Most of all. You never want anyone else to suffer as you have.

My only son Peter was killed in the Southall Rail Crash in Sept 1997. In the months following the crash it became obvious that there would be little justice for anyone involved in the Disaster.

The law Protected those who had failed to protect my son. How many sons and loved ones would be unprotected in the future? The Government continually talks of its support for stronger penalties. However little has been done. 

There is a dreadful common thread linking many disasters. They weren’t Acts of God. They needn’t have happened! The Government must introduce legal reforms that will change the law of Corporate Manslaughter. So that companies and other organisations can be held to account if their grossly negligent management failures cause death.

The prosecution for the Southall Rail crash failed because of the law. There was an inability to prosecute the Director and therefore the company escaped prosecution. At Southall, First Great Western Trains were fined 1.5 million.

Company fines often bear no relation to profits and 1.5 million was a mere drop in the ocean and quickly forgotten. The lack of justice for survivors and the bereaved can no longer be tolerated. The law and how it is enforced is not appropriate to the way companies are organised and work.

As a result, it protects companies and those who control them from proper accountability. There has been little to deter companies from placing the lives of the public and their employees at serious risk. People are continuing to die in disasters and workplaces while the law stands still.

Without exception, those bereaved in these tragedies are united in their determination that others should not suffer the same pain and confusion which they live with every day.

The success of this campaign is very important to me and others bereaved through negligence and carelessness. All of the disasters mentioned preventable. Satisfactory safety technology existed in all the fields of activity in which those companies were engaged.

It was particularly distressing to family groups that the British Criminal Justice System failed to prosecute companies and their senior offices for serious criminal offences relating tot these disasters. This absence of accountability undoubtedly leads to a climate of complacency.

Without exception, those bereaved in these tragedies are united in their determination that others should not suffer the same pain and confusion which they live with every day.

It must be remembered that while large scale disasters grab the headlines, many individuals are killed though negligence and illegal working practices. These are equally tragic and unacceptable. All bereaved have to find a reason to continue living their lives without their loved ones presence.

They must try to make sense of their loss, particularly when they have become ‘experts’ through Inquiries and Government Papers, and have found the law sadly lacking. So what do you do? In our case you change into the scariest people on this planet, particularly when dealing with authorities and the Government. The worst has already happened to you!. Your unbeatable strength is you wont go away! Your power comes from the heart and soul and not from you your company accounts!

We will see the law changed and we wont go away! What’s more scary that that?