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Irish Times
6 days ago
- General
- Irish Times
‘Simply not good enough': MPs concerned by ‘intolerable risks' at Sellafield site
'Intolerable risks' at the most hazardous parts of the Sellafield nuclear site are being exacerbated by poor performance, substandard equipment and staff shortages that make the facility even more dangerous, according to a report by MPs in Westminster. The UK's public accounts committee (PAC) also raised concerns about the proliferation of non-disclosure agreements to settle staff whistle-blowing complaints about safety and bullying at the site, located on the Cumbrian coast about 170km from Ireland. It said safety concerns and galloping cost overruns were 'simply not good enough'. The committee has released a report on the £136 billion (€162 billion) clean-up job at Sellafield, a former reprocessing and power plant that now essentially operates as a nuclear dump. It said the clean-up of the site is too slow and management keeps missing targets. It highlighted problems at decrepit buildings such as the Magnox Swarf Storage Silo (MSSS), which has leaked hazardous nuclear pondwater into the soil for seven years. The committee said it was enough to fill an Olympic swimming pool every three years. READ MORE The committee accused Sellafield Ltd, the company that operates the site on behalf of the British state, of 'underperformance' by taking too long to clear crumbling old buildings such as the MSSS. Its report said the 'consequence of this underperformance is that the buildings are likely to remain extremely hazardous for longer'. It complained that the timeline given by the company for clearing Sellafield's most dangerous buildings has slipped by 13 years since 2018. The leaking MSSS is being slowly emptied of its lethal material, but the PAC said it needs to be removed 24 times faster than it was last year within a decade, if it is to hit targets. [ Inside Sellafield: behind the razor wire, gun-toting guards and blast barriers at the toxic nuclear site Opens in new window ] 'The intolerable risks presented by Sellafield's ageing infrastructure are truly world-class,' said Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, the Tory MP who chairs the PAC. 'When visiting the site, it is impossible not to be struck by the fact that one can be standing in what is surely one of the most hazardous places in the world.' The PAC found that management needs to 'fundamentally transform how the site functions'. It is already estimated the clean-up of the site will take at least 100 years. Sellafield told the PAC it had made progress in some areas. The report also warned management must do more to 'build a culture where all employees feel able to raise concerns and report poor behaviour'. The PAC was told the company had used non-disclosure agreements 16 times in the last three years when settling staff claims. [ Nuclear accident in UK or Europe could significantly contaminate food in Ireland, EPA told Government Opens in new window ] Alison McDermott, a former executive at Sellafield who fought a legal battle with the company after she made a whistle-blowing complaint about safety and bullying, said the PAC report 'vindicates everything I said' about a 'toxic and dangerous' culture at Sellafield. She said 'Ireland is not safe' due to the way the site is run: 'This is not a British problem – it's a threat to everyone across the Irish Sea. The Irish Government must wake up.' The Irish Government once sued Britain over safety fears at Sellafield. It is believed the State made no submissions to the UK's PAC as part of its latest inquiry into the site.
The Guardian
20-05-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Watchdog calls for action on children's care case delays in England and Wales
The proportion of children in England and Wales subject to care proceedings who are having to wait more than a year to have their case resolved has increased more than 17-fold in the last seven years, a watchdog has found. The average duration of proceedings brought by local authorities to protect a child from harm (known as public law cases) was 36 weeks last year, according to the National Audit Office (NAO). In 2014 the government set a time limit of 26 weeks but it has never been met. In a report published on Wednesday, the NAO says the proportion of children waiting more than a year for a public law case to be resolved increased from 0.7% in January 2017 to 12% in December last year. The figures equate to approximately 70 and 1,200 children respectively. The watchdog is urging the government to do more to tackle delays that can mean children waiting longer for permanent care and living or contact arrangements, increasing risk of harm, anxiety, instability and disrupted friendships or education. Including private law cases, which involve parental disputes such as living or contact arrangements for their child, there were more than 4,000 children in England and Wales in family court proceedings lasting two years in December 2024. Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, the chair of the House of Commons public accounts committee, said: 'Too many children are suffering as a result of delays to family court proceedings, which are currently still far too long. The longer a case remains unresolved, the more likely it is that there are further delays, increasing the risk of harm to children and driving up public costs. 'Responsibilities for family justice are fragmented, with no single body responsible for overall performance. Government has neither the right data to fully understand the causes or impacts of delays, nor does it have an assessment of the capacity required to manage the system efficiently.' In December, nearly two-thirds of the 4,000 cases that had been open for 100 weeks or longer were in London and the south-east. London had an average duration of 53 weeks for cases brought by local authorities and 70 weeks for cases brought by parents. Wales performed best, averaging 24 weeks and 18 weeks respectively. Where there were longer delays, this reflected issues such as lower judicial capacity in those areas, the NAO said. There is no government time limit for private law cases, which took 41 weeks on average last year. The watchdog said the impact of delays on costs was significant, as evidence and assessments needed to be updated. Average spending on legal aid for a case brought by a local authority doubled between 2018 and 2022 from approximately £6,000 to about £12,000 – an annual increase of £314m in legal aid spending. Family courts have recovered much better than crown courts after the Covid-19 pandemic, with 47,662 family court cases outstanding (37,541 of them private law cases), down by more than a quarter since August 2021. But Gareth Davies, the head of the NAO, said: 'Many cases still take too long to complete and further action is needed to remove the barriers to a more efficient system, including poor-quality data and fragmented decision-making.' A government spokesperson said it had inherited a justice system in crisis, adding: 'We are working hard to improve their experience in the family courts further by expanding the successful pathfinder pilot, which has already reduced case times by 11 weeks, and investing £500m in early intervention. Cases are now moving faster.'
The Independent
13-05-2025
- Health
- The Independent
Ministers slammed over ‘jaw-dropping' NHS negligence claims for poor care
The NHS must do more to reduce 'tragic' incidents of patient harm and cut 'jaw-dropping' payouts for poor care, MPs have warned as costs spiral to a record high. Compensation for clinical negligence claims cost £2.8bn in 2023-24 – up from £2.6bn the year before – with hundreds of millions paid out in legal fees. The highest number of claims were for failings in emergency medicine, obstetrics, orthopaedic and general surgery, with maternity care payouts costing the most, totalling £1.1bn last year. The Department of Health and Social Care has set aside an 'astounding' £58.2bn to cover the potential costs of clinical negligence events occurring before April 2024. The public accounts committee sounded the alarm on the rise, saying ministers needed to get a grip on NHS finances. Its chair, Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, said: 'The fact that the government has set aside tens of billions of pounds for clinical negligence payments, its second most costly liability after some of the world's most complex nuclear decommissioning projects, should give our entire society pause. 'It must be a priority of the highest order for the government to reduce tragic incidences of patient harm and lay out a mechanism to reduce legal fees to manage the jaw-dropping costs involved more effectively.' The most recent NHS data shows 4,076 incidents of severe harm to patients and 4,449 patient deaths were recorded by the NHS in just three months from October to December last year. And a fifth of last year's record £2.8bn compensation bill – £545m – went to lawyers. That amount is higher than the entire expenditure of the government's legal department, the report found, which totalled £341m in the same year. In the past five years alone, NHS Resolution, which manages negligence claims, has spent over £12bn on payouts – £2.4bn of which has been spent on claimants' legal fees. 'If we can reduce the leakage of lawyers' fees in the middle, that benefits the whole of the NHS, because there will be more money available for other services,' said Sir Geoffrey, Hospital chiefs in England warned last week that they have been forced to cut nurse and doctor posts and scale back emergency and maternity care to meet the government 's 'eye watering' savings demands for 2025-26. The committee challenged the DHSC to set out how it intends to 'reduce tragic incidents of patient harm' and manage the costs of negligence 'more effectively'. Acknowledging the high cost of payouts for maternity care failings, Sir Geoffrey said the difference between some maternity units and others 'is quite significant'. He said: 'Obstetrics is an inherently dangerous process, so the line between doing harm and negligence is quite narrow, but the NHS need to look carefully at why some units do get more negligence claims than others.' MPs on the committee also criticised the DHSC, which they said 'lacks a grip of the financial pressures it faces'. MPs also raised concerns over the 'uncertainty' surrounding the abolition of NHS England, announced in March, which they said had created 'high levels of uncertainty for patients and for staff'. They said the DHSC had a 'lack of firm plans' for its closure and reducing its headcount by 50 per cent. 'At the moment, it looks a little bit like shifting the deck chairs on the Titanic. We really want to make sure that this thing is going to work properly,' Sir Geoffrey told The Independent. 'It has been two months since the government's decision to remove what up until now has been seen as a key piece of machinery without articulating a clear plan for what comes next, and the future for patients and staff remains hazy,' he said. MPs highlighted how some hospitals in England had pushed through unauthorised special exit packages – severance payments which require Treasury sign-off because they are new or contentious, totalling more than £180,000 in 2023/24. 'There remain far too many special severance payments where approval has only been sought after the payment has been made,' they added.
