Dalgety Bay Radiation

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 8:47 pm on 6 March 2013.

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Photo of Gordon Brown Gordon Brown Labour, Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath 8:47, 6 March 2013

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. This is a real problem.

I have a letter from the Minister of State, Ministry of Defence, Mr Francois—not the Minister who is replying to the debate—in response to my raising the question of radiation. In his letter, the Minister says:

“Correspondence should be addressed to SEPA as the Agency, and not MOD”.

The Ministry of Defence has failed to produce the report. It has failed to produce the investigation. It has not yet produced the investigatory assessment. At the same time, many people regard it as the initial polluter. For that Minister to say to a Member of Parliament that correspondence should be addressed to SEPA as the agency and not to the MOD is an abrogation of the Ministry’s responsibility in this matter.

I put it to the Minister that if he was writing to the chairman of his local council or to a constituent who had raised questions about the health of constituents as a result of contamination identified with the Ministry of Defence, and if the Ministry had not produced the necessary reports, he would have to be very careful about telling the chairman of his council or any other representative official that correspondence on such a matter should not be addressed to the Ministry of Defence. I hope that he will apologise for that when he speaks this evening.

The problem is deeper, however, and that is why I have had to come back again to raise the matter in the House. What has been omitted over the last 18 months is this fiction: the Ministry of Defence has refused to accept responsibility for the contamination of the area. The Ministry has persisted in saying that it does not yet accept that it was the original polluter in the area. We have evidence on the website of the Scottish Environment Protection Agency:

“It is thought that the contamination originates from the residue of radium coated instrument panels from military aircraft…The radium used by the MoD was primarily in luminescent paints.”

Then we have the letter sent to me by the Scottish Environment Protection Agency, which states:

“Works to identify other potential polluters at Dalgety Bay is continuing. However, to date, our investigation has not identified any other persons whom may have introduced the radium to the location.”

When this matter kicked off 18 months ago, the Ministry of Defence asked the Scottish Environment Protection Agency for a report and asked who was responsible. The agency was very clear indeed about who was responsible—the Ministry of Defence. The MOD chose not to accept this advice and it has been looking for landowners, developers, builders, residents and other participants in the area who might have been responsible for its pollution, but there is absolutely no doubt about it. It comes back not just to a legal responsibility, as I will show later, but a moral responsibility for the MOD to accept that it dumped the material in the first place, that the material is there because it came from MOD aircraft and that the pollution is the direct effect of having dumped it there. Refusing to accept responsibility is angering people in Dalgety Bay, with good cause.

Let me give a final reason why the Minister should stand before the House now and say that he will work closely with the Scottish Environment Protection Agency to get a remediation action plan under way so that work is completed by the end of the year. It is an irony that just at the time that the Ministry of Defence is refusing to accept responsibility for the contamination that exists in Dalgety Bay, a mile away at Rosyth dockyard, the MOD launched a consultation exercise two years ago and is examining whether the seven decommissioned submarines, four of them Polaris submarines, should be cut up and stored in the Rosyth area for years upon years. How is the MOD going to persuade the residents of Rosyth a mile away from Dalgety Bay that it should be entrusted with the safety and health of the local residents in decommissioning, breaking up and then storing submarines in Rosyth, when it cannot persuade the people of Dalgety Bay that the safety and health needs of the residents there are being taken seriously and it even refuses to admit its responsibility for the contamination while at the same time delaying the necessary remedial work?

I urge the Minister to be very careful in what he says to the House this evening about what the Ministry of Defence is going to do on this matter. He will say that the Ministry has tried its best, spent money on investigations and is monitoring the work. I well know the speech he is going to make, but the fact is that it has not produced the reports in time, not admitted responsibility for the pollution, not agreed the options for cleaning it up and not yet agreed to fund the remedial work.

The people of Fife county, whom I represent, have for years been servants of the Ministry of Defence. Rosyth dockyard and Rosyth naval base were set up 100 years ago, and 15,000 people work there. They refitted the ships and the submarines in war time and in peace time, and they have been loyal in support of the defence needs of this nation. They have done well by the Ministry of Defence; it is time that the Ministry of Defence does well by the people of Fife.