Lord Kangana wrote:
Well theres a clear duty of care by the club, because they were required to have a safety certificate. Which they didn't have. Cutting through the legalese, theres grounds for a corporate manslaughter charge.
That is not cutting through the legalese!
I agree that it is clear that the Club owed a duty of care and one that they breached.
The truth is they have already admitted as much and paid out on that basis. Following the public inquiry, civil action was launched to determine liability. Evidence from the Taylor report was submitted with any party allowed to contest facts within it. SYP did not contest liability in respect of those injured and bereaved at Hillsborough.
SYP did, however, initiate High Court action against SCC, SWFC and SWFC’s advisers, alleging there was a breach of a common duty of care and negligence on the part of the safety advisors. A private deal was struck where they agreed to split compensation payments to victims, resulting in the avoidance of any official ruling of responsibility.
This is actually a context that I think very few understand well. A lot of what the SYP did in terms of its positioning was a preparation for how liability was to be carved up between the parties. I won't go and find the relevant documents now, but I think the much-vilified Bettison was unusually sophisticated in his appreciation of the liability picture and one of the things he challenged in SYP's putting together of evidence was the idea that SYP had undertaken to 'monitor' the pens. You see him challenging this word and wanting to be clear that the police were not 'monitoring' in the sense of counting people. Actually not an unreasonable position, as Taylor himself acknowledged that the Club had control of the 'totaliser' counting system and the CCTV for the purpose of counting.
Anyway, getting back to the thrust of your point. I would be very surprised if one result of all this is for Sheffield Wednesday Football Club to be charged with corporate manslaughter. Admitting civil liability is one thing, but negligence so gross as to amount to a crime is a much, much higher bar. Despite the failings that are now obvious with hindsight, before the shake up that the event prompted, people were not thinking in terms of the possibility of people dying at football matches back then. Against this background, the Club did not behave in a completely callous and unreasonable way.
One under-appreciated fact is that the certificate was actually in the process of being updated. The council's role here is highly relevant. SCC were responsible for issuing, revising and updating the certificate for the stadium. Taylor described the attention they paid to this important licensing function as “woefully inadequate”. In the early 80s the council received notice from SWFC of planned modifications to the Hillsborough stadium and gave permission for such changes. Taylor believed at this point the local authority should have amended the safety certificate accordingly, but they didn't.
Taylor said, “The certificate took no account of the 1981 and 1985 alterations to the ground. A number of breaches of the ‘Green Guide’ standards were permitted'', while failure to revise the certificate allowed for breaches, such as the spacing of the crush barriers, width of emergency exit gates and gradient of tunnel, to persist. Basically the council should not have let SWFC keep its licence.
The council's chief licensing officer, Mr Bownes, who had the responsibility for referring planned amendments to the stadium back to the General Purposes Panel (GPP) for a final decision, did not inform the GPP of the decision to remove what was later determined to be a key barrier. Mr Bownes agreed to its removal on site. At the inquiry, Mr Bownes admitted that he was “ill equipped” to agree to such a decision.
Taylor said the agreement to its removal “ought not to have been made.” Mr Bownes did, however, inform the GPP that “the conditions [in the Safety Certificate] give some cause for concern as they appear to be inadequate or inappropriate in some areas.”
His report to the GPP said new safety conditions should be drafted. The GPP agreed and the task of revising the Safety Certificate began in June 1986. However, the tragic truth is that final draft was not circulated for review until March 30th 1989, 16 days before the disaster.
And another thing - the council had dictated in the original safety certificate (which we now know to have been invalidated because of ground changes) that the Club should arrange to be inspected annually by a chartered engineer. SWFC complied with this condition and employed consultant engineers Eastwood and Partners to inspect their stadium to ensure the club complied with the safety provisions detailed in the safety certificate. So the Club was actually paying people to look at this stuff - not the popular picture of cost shirking at every opportunity!
To cut that long story short - the Club shares the blame with Sheffield City Council and it advisers and was in the process of updating the safety certificate anyway. All three of those parties have admitted liability and done a deal between them to contribute to civil compensation claims.
Lord Kangana wrote:I would suggest that the case will be less clear cut for the police, though there are myriad rules governing what they should and shouldn't be doing to prevent crime in public. Though you'll be able to throw in perverting the course of justice, accessory after the fact etc. Its more likely that the Police will simply suffer at the hands of some kind of judicial review or public enquiry. Nevertheless, public servants are held to a higher standard of scrutiny than their private counterparts. I'd be utterly amazed if there weren't repercussions in the future.
It's very clear that the police owed some duty of care - indeed they have never contested that and have paid out, as described above. The question has always been "what was the extent of that duty?".
The truth is that the police have "suffered at the hands of a public enquiry" already - Taylor could scarcely have been more damning and that is the context for the entire 'fightback'. Repercussions? The way policing and safety at football matches was thought of underwent and swift and total revolution. There have rarely been events that have had more dramatic implications.