AIRCRAFT ACCIDENT INQUIRIES (Hansard, 8 February 1968)

§ Mr. Cranley Onslow (Woking)
I am grateful for the opportunity to raise some particular and general points about aircraft accident inquiries and grateful to the Minister for coming here at this late hour and at relatively short notice.
The Munich aircraft accident inquiry has already been the subject of an Adjournment Debate, thanks to my hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham (Mr. van Straubenzee), whom I am glad to see present, and on that occasion the hon. Gentleman held out some hopes. The Prime Minister mentioned this subject in a speech at Manchester and held out further hopes. But, so far, although hopes have been held out, there has been no sign of positive action, and this is concerning a number of hon. Members who are interested in seeing not only that Captain Thain is seen to have justice but also that the status and repute of the British investigators, at the R.A.E. 803 and elsewhere, who have held considerable trials into what they see as the causes of that accident, are not called in question
An investigation has been held in private—and, I believe, concluded—into the relatively recent accident to the Iberia Caravelle at Haslemere, but we do not yet know its findings, since no formal report has been published. Why is this so? Is the Minister satisfied that, if this investigation has established the causes of that accident, action has been taken to prevent a repetition of such a tragedy?
I also invite him to comment on one point concerning the inquest on the victims of this tragedy, at which the coroner said that he did not propose to call certain evidence, because he understood that there was to be a public inquiry. Because there has not been a public inquiry, for all we know that evidence has not been heard at all.
I come now to the inquiries relating to the Stockport accident. It seems to many people that a curious situation has arisen. The Minister may have seen a report on the front page of the Daily Express on Monday of this week on this point. To judge from the Answer I received to my Parliamentary Question on the same day, the results of the investigations which are being carried out at Boscombe Down are not yet to hand and the technical inquiry which is being carried out there—into the question of the aircraft's fuel system—is not yet completed. Obviously, until it is completed, a final judgment on some of the issues involved must be deferred.
In the meantime, I am bound to tell the Minister that public confidence is not likely to be created when a situation arises in which the competence of the Air Registration Board can be, and has been, challenged in public on the basis of evidence which could not, when it was given, have been substantiated. If that evidence could have been substantiated, it clearly would not have been necessary for the tests to be conducted, as they have been, at Boscombe Down. At this stage, I do not wish to say more on this subject, except to add that here is a situation which calls for some explaining. Confidence must have been shaken by the way in which the course of events proceeded at 804 the inquiry, and confidence needs to be restored.
This brings me to my general point, which is to ask what these inquiries are really for and whether they serve the purpose they are intended to serve. The Minister may recall that on 19th July last a Question was asked of the President of the Board of Trade by his hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow, Govan (Mr. Rankin). This concerned the nature of the inquiry which was to be held into the Stockport accident. My point centres particularly on the supplementary question which was then asked by the hon. Gentleman and on the Minister's reply. The hon. Gentleman asked: Would my right hon. Friend agree that when inquiries are necessary in future it would be better to hold full technical investigations—attended by experts who have no set interests other than that of finding out the cause of the accident—instead of public inquiries, where the legal experts tend to defend interests instead of finding out causes? The Minister replied: I believe that it was necessary in this case, in view of the magnitude of this accident, to have a full public inquiry. However, I have no doubt that all the necessary technical investigation will be made and that this evidence will be available at the inquiry."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 19th July, 1967; Vol. 750, c. 2128–9.] I fail to see, incidentally, if the magnitude of the Stockport accident justified a public inquiry, in what respect the Haslemere accident did not. I cannot see any important distinction. And, as events have transpired at the inquiry, I wonder whether the Minister was right to say that all the necessary technical evidence would be available. Be that as it may, my main concern is that the Minister missed the real point, because the first essential in an aircraft accident inquiry is that the cause of the accident should, if possible, be discovered. The magnitude of it is relatively unimportant because if it can be discovered what caused a minor accident this may prevent a recurrence in a much more serious and major form later.
There is considerable feeling that the needs of technical investigation at these inquiries tend to be overlaid by legal considerations; that there is greater interest in proving who was not to blame than in establishing actual or probable reasons for the accident. I am not against the appearance of counsel at these 805 inquiries. Nor am I against public inquiries to investigate accidents. I recognise that it is important that these inquiries should, in the majority of cases, be conducted publicly. It would clearly be wrong to exclude counsel from the proceedings of an inquiry, but equally these inquiries should be conducted with the emphasis on the technical rather than the legal side. There should be a greater injection of specialisation into the proceedings. Perhaps by the incorporation of expert assessors to advise the court, pilot representation could be built into the procedure.
If this specialisation could be provided, inquiries might not only be less legalistic but also more expeditiously conducted, because there would no longer be a need for the set piece deployment of the case for the prosecution—although I recognise that is not precisely the right word—by counsel briefed for that purpose. The inquiry could get straight down to the basic causes and probabilities involved. In this respect many people familiar with the system prevailing in the United States for the investigation of accidents consider that this has advantages over the situation which prevails here.
I hope that the Minister will take these considerations seriously into account in the context of any changes he has under consideration. It is essential that the public should be informed of what is involved in these matters and should have full confidence. We are becoming a nation of air travellers and public confidence in the safety of air travel is just as important as public confidence in the safety of rail travel. People will be reassured by inquiries into accidents only if they can clearly see that the purpose of the inquiry is the rigorous pursuit of truth and that the procedures adopted at these inquiries mean that wherever the truth can be found the inquiry will find it. I hope that in answering the debate the Minister will be able to tell me that he shares that view.

§ The Minister of State, Board of Trade (Mr. J. P. W. Mallalieu)
I begin at once by assuring the hon. Member for Woking (Mr. Onslow) that I totally agree with his last remarks. The purpose of accident inquiries must primarily be to get at the facts; to get at the truth of what actually 806 happened. They are not intended—this goes for inquiries in other countries too—to impute blame. They are intended to find the truth. Everything I can do in my position will be to ensure that in any changes that we make in our procedures that essential point is kept right at the top of our priorities.
The hon. Member began by referring to a number of accidents and accident investigations. The first was the accident, now long ago, at Munich. His hon. Friend, the Member for Wokingham (Mr. van Straubenzee) has been very active indeed in pressing certain matters on me. I assure him in public, as I have already done in private, and I assure the hon. Member for Woking, that I am anxious to get a settlement of this business which is just and satisfactory to all parties and I shall continue with the course on which I am bound.
The hon. Member for Woking referred also to the unhappy Caravelle disaster. The private technical investigations into that are not yet complete, but, so far as they have gone they show no evidence or reason which would make me feel that having a public inquiry would get closer to the truth than we are doing by the present technical investigation. When the results are to hand, the conclusions will be given to the House.
I come now to the Stockport inquiry, which leads me on to the general point which the hon. Gentleman made. It must be the duty of an advocate to alert the court or the inquiry to any possibilities. It is the duty of any advocate for whatever interest, the State or individual parties, to make sure that a possibility is investigated by the court. Here, also, the investigations are not yet complete. As I told the House the other day, the tests are not yet finished. But, if we have public inquiries at which counsel appear, I am certain that counsel will conceive it as their duty to alert the court to any point which they think worthy of investigation.

§ Mr. Onslow
I do not dissent from that, but I do not believe that it corresponds with what has happened. A particular suggestion has been put forward, not as a possibility which should be investigated but as a cause which is asserted, and it has been met by a rebuttal from the Air Registration Board to the effect that the asserted cause is not 807 only improbable but impossible. The situation here is that those who instruct the Attorney-General, or the Attorney-General himself, on the one hand, or the Air Registration Board, on the other, must be very wrong. This is bound to undermine public confidence.

§ Mr. Mallalieu
I suspect that the hon. Gentleman is relying on newspaper reports of what was said before the inquiry. It would be reprehensible if I were to make any sort of pronouncements before the inquiry's results were produced, and I shall not do so; but I certainly would not rely for any assertion in the House or for any evidence in a court on newspaper reports. But may I leave that?
The hon. Gentleman has raised in the House a matter of serious importance. It has been in the mind of the Department which I helped to serve for a considerable time. I refer to the whole question of the machinery of inquiry into accidents. Anyone who has read or watched the proceedings at public inquiries will be conscious—to put it no higher—that, conceivably, that very British procedure has some defects. It can happen at a public inquiry that people, counsel or individuals, are more concerned with attacking or defending than with getting at the truth which we wish to disclose. Yet there are occasions when, in the public interest, it is totally necessary to have the whole thing out in public, regardless of possible defects in the public procedures. For a considerable time we have been searching for a procedure which would, not allay public fears, but which would inform the public and show it that the 808 search for truth was really going on, without having the defects that something akin to a court of law can sometimes have.
We have looked at the procedures in other countries, particularly the United States, to which the hon. Gentleman referred. I am still not satisfied that it will meet the needs we both have in mind. But we have not stopped trying. I do not believe that our accident investigation procedures or those of other countries are perfect. We are trying to find a better way which will suit what I may call in a loose term our democratic way of doing things, and yet will in no way hamper the technical investigation and the arrival at truth. I have not found a solution yet, but if any hon. Member who has thought about these things can come up with suggestions which will really meet the aim we all try to serve I shall look at them with the greatest care.
It happens to be my misfortune in my present job to spend most of my time coming here and talking about disasters. But it is also a delight and privilege that I am in a position, provided I can get sensible ideas from my own thinking or with the help of other people, to make possible in the future a diminution of the sort of disasters that we are having in the air and at sea. If the hon. Member or the House as a whole have ideas on the very important point he has raised, I appeal to hon. Members not to hesitate to put them forward. I shall consider them as seriously as I can.