Council refuses to act as MoD Machrihanish radioactive contamination issue unravels

We published recently a four part series of investigative articles on matters of concern related to the former Ministry of Defence (MoD) airbase at Machrihanish in Kintyre.

In these, we drew attention to the way in which the probable radioactive contamination of the site was being airbrushed out of the disposal process.

At that stage we confirmed that we had first hand information that nuclear depth charges were held there when the site was active – most probably stored in the underground armaments silos at the part of the property known at ‘Site 1′.

Of immediate concern was the extent to which the environmental security of the site could be guaranteed.

There are public health and safety issues, with potential buyers being shown around. There are legal issues, as the potential buyer of the site would assume residual liabilities.

As we said in these articles, our enquiries of the MoD produced only verbal assurances that the MoD had already carried out what it described as ‘ground assessments’ and that the results of these would be made known to bidders but not to the general public.

The MoD was unable to tell us when these ‘ground assessments’ had been carried out – for reasons which become very clear below. Nor was it able to tell us what ‘assessment’ technologies had been used, nor offer formal assurances that the site had been screened for radioactive contamination.

New information

Since we published these articles we have had information from sources in Kintyre that, when the base was active during the cold war period, nuclear weapons testing was carried out there. These may well have been tests of the nuclear depth charges but it is also possible that other nuclear weapons were brought for testing to RAF Machrihanish in the then even more remote Kintyre.

Such activities may also have left radioactive contaminants behind them.

Locals remember the painfully bright flashes. No information was given and no advice offered to seek shelter.

These were, of course, the bad old days where British servicemen were marched without protection of any kind into the areas where large scale nuclear bombs were detonated in testing and tasked with watching the explosions.

The rate of cancers resulting from these experiences was very marked. In terms of accepting responsibility through compensation, the MoD has literally being sitting on its hands in a series of  legal obstructions to actions designed to bring them into court. They are simply waiting for all known victims to die.

There has long been public concern at what is said to be the very high rate of the occurrence of cancers in the Campbeltown area but this has not necessarily been fully connected to the nuclear test activities at the airbase, at which a significant number of local people worked. These people would now be in their fifties.

We understand, however, that a campaign on this issue was mounted locally as recently as around three years ago.

This is now a matter for serious investigation.

It should be understood from the outset that, even if it can eventually be shown that certain cancer clusters were potentially related to radioactive contamination, many other local incidents of cancer will have been entirely unrelated to this.

It may also prove very hard to get the necessary records. We have found the Public Health Protection Department based in Inverness to be singularly uninterested, making the use of the word ‘protection’ fashionably ironic. We are pursuing sources of records which, if and when we get them, we will recruit professional help in examining.

Request for information

We would welcome information from the Kintyre public on this matter. First hand information is particularly important, in the details of witnessing the explosions resulting from nuclear tests, in the facts of illnesses, as are contacts for those who have seen explosions and suffered illness.

We would also welcome information from and about the Kintyre campaign on this matter.

Machrihanish Airbase Community Company: new actions and consequences

Concerned by the public health issues and the potential nature and extent of the unidentified liabilities they might inherit, the Machrihanish Airbase Community Company MACC) has been pursuing the matter itself. The company has been formed to try to buy the site as part of growing a sustainable community in this remote part of Argyll,

Concerns are threefold:

• public health and safety
• MACC liability, should it purchase the site
• timescales – the company will have 4 weeks from the date of valuation in which to conduct a Community Ballot across a wide area of Kintyre, achieving a majority for the proposal to buy.

The issue here is both moral and political. How can MACC ask or persuade its community to agree to the purchase of the site as a community asset, while the environmental health of the site remains unknown?

MACC has therefore been responsibly immersing itself in legislation, particularly the European Liability Directive (now in force) and the Contaminated Land Guidance, in order to come to terms with the situation.

It has found the following (the emphases are ours):

3.2 (of the Guidance) Where a Local Authority considers that land in its area may be radioactive contaminated land it has a duty to give notice of that fact to SEPA. The authority may consider that land may be radioactively contaminated land as a result of:

• (a)  its own gathering of information as part of its inspection strategy which has been developed to look for land contaminated as a result of substances that are not radioactive
• (b) receiving information or a complaint from a member of the public, business or a voluntary organisation.

Request to Argyll and Bute Council

MACC then requested the Council to treat its email communicating the relevance of the legislation and the guidance as information and complaint under (2) above; and therefore formally asked it to advise SEPA that it considers that there may be radioactive contaminated land at Machrihanish Airbase.

The Council has declined to do so. In response to a communication from For Argyll on the action it proposed to take, a spokesperson said: ‘Defence Estates has confirmed that it will complete a land quality assessment of the site, including radiological survey, in the near future.

‘Our view is that it is sensible to wait until this has been concluded before deciding on a course of action.

We have therefore explained to the Machrihanish Airbase Community Company (MACC) that it would be inappropriate to ask SEPA to investigate the site at this time.

‘In the meantime, if MACC or anyone else has any evidence relating to contamination or radioactive materials, we would be happy to reconsider the situation’.

The issues here

• The MoD obviously lied, not – demonstrably – for the first time, in saying previously to us that they had already carried our ‘ground assessments’. These have clearly not been done even now, as Defence Estates have informed the Council here that they will be carried out ‘in the near future’.
• The MoD has now had to admit that radioactive screening will be a necessary part of these ‘ground assessments’. Previously it had simply blandly assured us that the ‘ground assessments’ had shown that the site was clean. Now we know that these ‘ground assessments’ had not even been carried out  at the time of this assurance.
• It is misguided in the extreme to leave the testing on such a serious matter solely to the charge of the MoD, proven to be unreliable witnesses and ‘economical with the truth’.
• The Council has an overarching duty of care to its constituents, which it neglects if it does not respond to the informal request from MACC to notify SEPA on the possible presence of radioactive contaminants on the site.
• The legislation and the guidance on it, advanced by MACC, does not leave it open to the Council to refuse to act as requested.

We therefore publicly request the Council to take the action it has been formally asked to do by MACC, with the weight of law behind it.

This matter is not properly or simply a matter for the MoD, as the famously inactive Trasport Minister, Stewart Stevenson, has recently declared in a letter to Argyll’s MSP Jim Mather.

Yet the issue is recognised to be a serious one. HIAL, operator of Campbeltown civil airport on the base and at one point – not so long ago a potential purchaser of the entire site and not necessarily out of the picture now -  has been aware of the contamination issue.

It has put the liability involved at ‘£10s of millions, recognising that the nominal figure of £20 million is unlikely to meet the need.

It even suggested to Defence Estates that the site should come with a ‘dowry’ – a reasonable proposal rejected out of hand by one to whom we will return – Ian Hay.

A senior member of the Council’s staff has advised MACC to seek legal advice on the liability issue. MACC has asked HIE to pay the legal fees of such an imperative – and to date the silence has been unbroken.

This is a public health and safety issue. Responsibility for that rests squarely with Argyll and Bute Council as the body charged with and legally empowered to take initiating action on this. It has been legally required to do so by MACC and now also by ourselves.

We do not doubt the Council’s sense of responsibility but we do question the long history of subservience which has made Councils afraid to act as they are legally required to do; and has created in the Ministry of Defence a culture of profound dishonesty.

Note: In the following days, we will be turning to other aspects, now in the public domain, of duplicitous conduct by the MoD in respect of its disposal of the former Machrihanish airbase.

The photograph at the top shows the Control Tower of the Civil Airport at the former Machrihanish airbase. It is by copyright holder Patrick Mackie and reproduced here under the Creative Commons licence.