A group of young people who blame their disabilities on their mothers’ exposure to toxic materials can seek compensation from the local council after winning a crucial legal ruling today.
They claim the birth defects they suffered were caused by exposure in the womb to an “atmospheric soup of toxic materials” when Corby steel works in Northamptonshire was redeveloped.
Today Corby Borough Council, which was responsible for the reclamation of a former steelworks, was found liable at London’s High Court.
The action is thought to be the first of its kind since the thalidomide scandal in the Sixties.
One of the children affected was Dylan South, 13, who endured medical treatment every day for the first five years of his life.
He was born with a deformed right foot and still suffers severe pain when he goes through growth spurts.
“I can’t do some things that other kids are doing, I can’t run,” he said.
Dylan was in court today to hear the judge’s ruling and said afterwards: “I am very happy.”
The group, mostly teenagers, all have serious disabilities; some have missing or underdeveloped fingers and three have deformities on their feet. Others have heart defects, eye problems and skin conditions.
They had accused Corby of negligence while carrying out the work between 1985 and 1999. The council denies the allegation that there was a link between the deformities and the removal of waste to a quarry north of the site.
One of the mothers, Mandy Wright, said the “best thing” now would be for the council to apologise to the children. “That’s all I want - a sorry to the children,” she said.
The families' solicitor Des Collins said: “The first thing I would like to say is how terribly sorry we are that the council put the families through 10 years of anguish in the way they did. It was totally, totally unnecessary.
“What is even more appalling now is I hear from the council that they, even now, refuse to accept the inevitability of the position they are in.
“They got it wrong. They should simply put their hands up now and admit it. We will have to fight on, but we are quite determined to do that.”
Today Mr Justice Akenhead said that the council was liable, paving the way for the youngsters, aged between nine and 21, to seek compensation if they can show a direct causal link in the case of the defects they have individually suffered.
The judge said: “I do not consider that there was a ’systemic’ breakdown as such within [the council] - what happened was that it bit off more than it could chew and did not really appreciate the enormity, ramifications and difficulty of what it was setting out to achieve in terms of removing and depositing very substantial quantities of contaminated material.”
The judge said that his ruling on liability did not cover the two youngest claimants.
The question of causation - whether specific defects were caused by the toxic materials - will be decided at a later date. At a hearing in February this year, David Wilby, QC, representing the claimants, said that the disabilities were caused when their mothers ingested or inhaled toxic substances from the "gargantuan" redevelopment works.
He added that one expert, in trying to convey the appearance of the minute particles hanging over the town at that time, had described it as an "atmospheric soup of toxic materials".
Mr Wilby said that from the council's perspective, it believed it was acting in the interests of the population of Corby by replacing a redundant industry with what it perceived to be new ventures.
He told the court: "I hope it's not too unkind to suggest that, if one reads the papers, particularly the minutes of various council meetings, their motive - to a very considerable degree - was money. They looked to the Government and to the redevelopment organisations for the funds to redevelop the sites. They used that money to pay local contractors and the reality was that many of the contracts were awarded to friends or former work colleagues of members of the council."
He said that when the council began its work, hazardous materials were moved from the site to other parts of Corby, involving "vast numbers of vehicle movements". Mr Wilby compared travelling behind such a vehicle to driving behind a gritter, except that if you were in the car behind and inhaled the minute particles, you would not know it had happened.
Mr Wilby said that legally the landmark ruling was “extremely important”. He said: “It is the first time in the world that it has been established that airborne pollution can cause birth defects of this type.”
All other cases, such as that of Erin Brockovich, involved water pollution.
Mothers of the children and young people lived or regularly visited Corby between 1984 and 1999, when the council undertook demolition, excavation and redevelopment of one of the largest sites in Western Europe, covering 680 acres. It had four blast furnaces and two coke oven complexes. Over the 50 years of its operation a huge quantity of industrial waste was deposited there.
The steel works, Corby's main employer, closed after 60 years in 1980 with the loss of 10,000 jobs. Over the next 17 years, the buildings were demolished and the site reclaimed in parcels of land, which involved the removal of waste, steel dust and slag to a quarry north of the site.
Chris Mallender, chief executive of the council, said: "For the past five years we have thoroughly investigated every aspect of the claims they are making and we know that there is no link between the reclamation work that was carried out in Corby, over a period of 20 years, and these children's birth defects."
He added that epidemiological data would show that there was no cluster of cases and that the numbers of children with such deformities was "normal" for the population.
In his lengthy judgment - which ran to 919 paragraphs - the judge said there was a “statistically significant” cluster of birth defects between 1989 and 1999.
Council leader Pat Fawcett also spoke after the hearing, saying: “There were mistakes at that time and we can understand why mistakes were made.
“British Steel closed and there were God knows how many unemployed in Corby and it was trying to get industry into the town and things were done quickly - maybe more quickly than they should have been done.
“But I think people were acting in the best interests of the town at the time.”
Source:The times
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