Cledwyn Hughes – 1967 Statement on Aberfan Inquiry
The statement made by Cledwyn Hughes, the then Secretary of State for Wales, in the House of Commons on 26 October 1967.
I beg to move, That this House takes note of the Report of the Tribunal appointed under the Tribunals of Inquiry (Evidence) Act 1921 to inquire into the disaster at Aberfan (House of Commons Paper No. 553). Just over a year ago this House and the whole world was shocked to learn of the dreadful tragedy which had occurred at Aberfan, a small mining village near Merthyr Tydfil. Hundreds of thousands of tons of colliery waste suddenly moved down the steep mountainside and overwhelmed a large part of the junior school and a number of houses in the vicinity. Desperate efforts at rescue were made by those nearby, who were joined by others who poured into Aberfan from all over South Wales and beyond, but no one was taken out of the ruins alive later than two hours after the first movement of the tip, and a hundred and forty four persons, the majority of them young children, lost their lives.
As soon as news of the tragedy reached me I went immediately to Aberfan to see whether I could be of use. After seeing the site my first concern was to clarify the division of responsibility for the work that was going on. The Chief Constable of Merthyr had been placed in overall operational charge, and I confirmed this. The National Coal Board was asked to concentrate on the stabilisation of the tip, and the local authority was asked to take full responsibility for all the rescue work. The other local authorities, who had so readily and promptly come to help, willingly accepted my invitation to put their resources temporarily under the control of the officials of the Merthyr Tydfil Borough Council.
Later that evening I was joined by my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister, who made it clear that the whole of the resources of the Government were at my disposal for the rescue operation. Other colleagues in the Government also came to the site.
I have already in this House thanked all those who took part in the rescue operation for the splendid work which they performed in the most harrowing circumstances.
No time was lost in setting up a Tribunal of Inquiry into all the circumstances of the disaster and we were fortunate to secure the services as Chairman of Lord Justice Edmund Davies, a Welshman born and bred in a neighbouring valley and renowned for his distinction as a lawyer and for his humanitarian sympathy, and as members of the Tribunal with him, Mr. Harold Harding, the eminent civil engineer, and Mr. Vernon Lawrence, the greatly respected former Clerk to the Monmouthshire County Council.
Lord Justice Edmund Davies promptly visited the scene of the disaster and arrangements were quickly made for the Tribunal to sit at Merthyr Tydfil and a preliminary meeting was held on 8th November. The proceedings were opened on 29th November by my right hon. and learned Friend the Attorney-General, and so began what was to prove the longest inquiry of its kind in British legal history.
Written statements were taken by the Treasury Solicitor from all who wished to give evidence, about 250 witnesses in all, and of these 136 gave oral evidence also, being examined and cross-examined by counsel and questioned by members of the Tribunal. Including the preliminary meeting the Tribunal sat in public for 77 days, first at Merthyr Tydfil and later at Cardiff, and commanded, I believe, universal admiration for their patience and thoroughness in elucidating the facts. The Tribunal finally rose at the end of April and the members then addressed themselves to the massive task of sifting the evidence and drawing up their report and recommendations.
As the House knows, the Chairman placed a copy of the Tribunal’s Report in my hands in the latter half of July and it was printed by order of the House and published on 3rd August. It is not my intention to go through the Report, but I am sure that it would be the wish of the House that I should express our admiration for the high sense of duty with which the Tribunal applied itself to its most onerous task and our gratitude for its findings and for its recommendations on the measures needed to prevent a recurrence of such a disaster. These findings and recommendations, as has been made clear already, have commanded general acceptance by Her Majesty’s Government. We are all much indebted to Lord Justice Edmund Davies and his colleagues who have performed a great public service.
Before I come to action taken on receipt of the Report, I should like to say a word or two about action taken during, and even before, the sittings of the Tribunal. Immediately after the disaster the National Coal Board ordered an inspection of all tips, active or disused, in the Board’s ownership and my right hon. Friend, the Minister of Housing and Local Government and I invited local authorities in England and Wales, invoking the assistance of the National Coal Board as necessary, to arrange for an inspection of all tips in private ownership. These measures disclosed potential instability in several tips and appropriate precautions were taken and remedial action put in hand at once.
The incidents which occurred during the heavy rains of last week, however, although relatively minor in character, demonstrated that some tips can still present problems and that much remains to be done. As hon. Members will hear from my right hon. Friend who hopes to wind up this debate, the efforts of the National Coal Board, the Government, and all concerned, are being directed to ensure that all problems, both large and small, can be foreseen and promptly dealt with.
One of the results of the disaster at Aberfan was to give a new stimulus also to the effort to clear up the land left derelict by industrial processes of the past, a problem of which everyone has long been uncomfortably aware, especially in the mining valleys of South Wales. The objective of this effort is not only to reclaim land now useless so that it may be available for industry or housing or other beneficial use, but also to make these areas more attractive to incoming industry and for those who live in them. To pursue this objective more effectively, shortly after the disaster I set up in the Welsh Office in Cardiff a Derelict Land Unit to work closely with the local authorities in preparing schemes of rehabilitation and getting them carried out.
With the co-operation of the Board of Trade, progress has already been made to an extent which is, I think, most encouraging. So far, the unit has had discussions with 60 local authorities and has visited 115 derelict sites, covering approximately 2,650 acres, in 42 of these local authority areas. The unit has been asked to help by preparing outline proposals for 48 sites, covering about 1,000 acres, and has prepared such proposals for 10 of these sites and is at present engaged on preparing them for others.
The first stage of one large tip scheme has been completed and work on others is well under way—for example, work on the huge Lewis Merthyr tip in the Rhondda, being done in conjunction with a coal recovery operation. Achievement of the objective inevitably takes a very long time. One cannot heal in a day the scars of great wounds made over generations. It is a task of great magnitude. But during this past year much more work has been done or started than in the whole of the preceding five years—and the way has been prepared for a much accelerated rate of progress in the future.
The National Coal Board has also changed its basic structure and now has three levels of authority instead of the former five. This change, which was in hand before Aberfan for other reasons, should go a long way to reducing the difficulties of communication to which the Tribunal drew attention. This reorganisation took effect from the beginning of April this year. The Board’s civil engineering organisation has also been strengthened and a post of area civil engineer has been created in each area. The many detailed measures which the Board has taken to improve its organisation and avoid blurring of responsibilities are summarised in a note which has been made available in the Vote Office by my right hon. Friend the Minister of Power.
Now to return to the Report. The oral evidence tendered to the Tribunal was recorded in a daily transcript which was made available to all the parties appearing before the Tribunal, and of course, to the Tribunal members. Copies of the written evidence received a similar circulation so far as the number of copies available permitted. The Tribunal, in its Report, quotes freely from both the oral and the written evidence and the Report promised the publication of the papers recording the results of the investigations carried out, in view of their scientific interest and importance.
Arrangements for the publication of this material are well forward, but I must tell the House that the volume is unlikely to appear before next Easter. The reason for this is that it is necessary to redraw, so as to render them suitable for printing, the large number of maps, diagrams and drawings which accompany the text. To publish the text alone would be simpler, but useless, as much of it is a commentary on the illustrations drawings and diagrams. The work is going ahead with all speed and I am told that those who are familiar with the processes of printing scientific documents will be well satisfied if the date I have mentioned can in fact be met.
Now I come to the Tribunal’s lessons and recommendations and the action which is being taken, or has already been taken, to implement them. Some, as the Tribunal pointed out, require legislation and this is being prepared with a view to its being introduced next Session.
One of the Questions to be considered is what should be done about the remaining tips at Aberfan. I say “remaining tips” because, during the course of the very extensive work which has been done by the National Coal Board since the disaster, to ensure safety, the rest of the disaster tip has virtually disappeared, and the area of hillside over which it slipped has been cleaned up and covered with a new growth of grass.
In the spring of this year, the National Coal Board commissioned a landscape consultant, who has lived 20 years in Wales, to prepare a scheme taking into account all the considerations. This scheme, illustrated by a large scale model, was explained to representatives of the Aberfan Parents and Residents’ Association, accompanied by their expert advisers, and to representatives and officials of the Merthyr Tydfil Corporation, at a meeting in the Welsh Office a week ago, under the chairmanship of my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State. The model is now on display in the village of Aberfan.
This scheme incorporates all the further safety measures proposed by all the expert advisers who gave evidence before the Tribunal. Apart from these further safety measures, the proposals involve reducing the height of the tips, smoothing the contours, and sowing and planting the whole area below the area of burning tip material with grass, gorse, broom and a variety of trees, including some fairly large transplanted trees.
I understand that the preliminary civil engineering works—that is to say, the further drainage measures, the removal and redisposition of substantial quantities of tip material, and the terracing—can be completed in about a year. If a beginning is made soon, perhaps all and certainly the greatest part of the sowing and planting can then be done in the planting season of the winter of 1968–69; and, by the spring of 1969, not only would the whole of the tips complex be greatly altered in outline, but also the whole of the area below the burning tips would be green.
Most of the Tribunal’s recommendations are of general application. First of all, the Tribunal stated that tips should all be regarded as potentially dangerous, although the Tribunal recognises that the dangers mainly arise with active working tips; secondly, tips should all be treated as engineering structures and, therefore, the procedures of preliminary site investigation and subsequent control customary in other branches of civil engineering should be applied. These two propositions are accepted by the National Coal Board and are already being acted on. I commend them to all who are in any way concerned with spoil heaps, whether connected with the coal industry or not.
I have already mentioned the new structure of the National Coal Board, which will improve, among other things, the state of internal communications. The observations of the Tribunal upon this aspect are not, I am sure, unheeded by many—and I am not now referring only to the coal industry—who have had occasion to consider how their own conduct would have stood up to a similar searching inquiry. I am sure that all hon. Members would agree that there is a lesson here for us all, for everybody engaged in any enterprise where more than a handful of people are involved.
My right hon. Friend the Minister of Power proposes to appoint a National Tip Safety Committee to advise him, and perhaps other Ministers, also, on problems affecting the stability of tips. Discussions are now going on as to the terms of reference such a Committee might have and I hope to see it constituted in the very near future. The Committee, when set up, will be asked as one of its first tasks to consider a standard code of practice.
The Tribunal’s recommendations which require legislation fall mainly within the field of my right hon. Friend the Minister of Power, who will be replying to this debate on behalf of the Government, though there is one matter affecting local authorities which is in the field of my right hon. Friend the Minister of Housing and Local Government and myself.
My right hon. Friend the Minister of Power is preparing legislation to amend the Mines and Quarries Act, 1954, so as to give effect to those of the Tribunal’s recommendations which require new legislation. He will give the House details of his proposals and the House may take it that they will be comprehensive. Broadly speaking, the Ministry of Power and the Mines Inspectorate will be given the additional powers and duties recommended by the Tribunal and tips forming part of active mines and quarries will be regularly inspected by persons competent to judge their stability.
I should like myself to say something about the powers and responsibilities of local authorities, although details will need to be worked out in consultation with local authority associations. If any local authority has any reason to fear that a working tip presents a hazard, it should at once inform the Ministry of Power or the local Inspector of Mines. The Ministry will immediately make an investigation and, if need be, require the owner to carry out tests or remedial work. If the local authority is still not satisfied, the matter can be referred to an independent arbiter, who will be empowered to order further work to be done.
In the case of a disused tip which gives cause for anxiety, a local authority should also get in touch with the Ministry and obtain the advice of the Mines Inspectorate. In the light of this advice, the local authority could decide whether there was a prima facie case of instability. The authority would be empowered to require the owner to carry out specified tests and to furnish a report and also to carry out specified remedial work. The local authority would also have default powers to carry out tests or do the works themselves or appoint contractors to do so. If the owner objected to any test or remedial work, he could appeal to the Minister of Power.
These proposed arrangements should go far to ensure that local authorities are fully empowered to protect the inhabitants of their area—a protection which, as the Tribunal pointed out, it is every citizen’s right to expect.
Besides safety, there is the question of the general appearance of working tips. The local planning authorities are able to control this by imposing conditions when they grant planning permission. This applies both to tipping operations and also to the recovery of material from disused tips.
I now turn to a subject on which the Tribunal very properly made no recommendation, though no small part of its Report was concerned with it, namely, the responsibility of individuals for the disaster and the strictures passed on other individuals whose conduct was censured by the Tribunal. This aspect of the Report has received long and anxious consideration by the Government, by my right hon. Friend the Minister of Power and by the National Coal Board. My right hon. and learned Friend the Attorney-General came to the conclusion that the facts disclosed by the Report did not justify the institution of criminal proceedings. My right hon. Friend the Minister of Power did not accept the offered resignation of the Chairman of the National Coal Board and made known his reasons for asking Lord Robens to continue in office. Those individuals named in the Report who are still in the service of the National Coal Board have been moved to other work.
In paragraph 210 of the Report the Tribunal referred to “the vastly disagreeable task of censure” which the sense of public duty of its members obliged it to carry out. In a moving passage in paragraph 207, the Tribunal expressed its belief that Whether or not named or adversely referred to in this Report, there must be many today with hearts made heavy and haunted by the thought that if only they had done this, that or the other the disaster might have been averted. Of these, some will blame themselves needlessly; others, while blameworthy in some degree, will condemn themselves with excessive harshness; yet others must carry the heavy burden of knowing that their neglect played an unmistakeable part in bringing about the tragedy. There, in my view, the matter ought now to be allowed to rest.
Finally, I should like to speak of the village of Aberfan as it is today. A sad anniversary has just passed and renewed the poignancy of grief for those who lost loved ones. But life must go on, and Aberfan is bravely facing the task of physical reconstruction and its families the no less difficult task of restoring mental tranquillity. Thanks to the wonderfully generous response of the public to the appeal for the Aberfan Fund, the resources are not lacking. But if the inhabitants are to find peace, they need a period away from the glare of publicity to which they have been exposed for so long. I appeal to everyone to give them the quiet they need to bear their burden of grief and to rebuild their shattered lives.
