Buncefield Oil Depot Fire

My hon. Friend raises exactly the issue that I was coming to. The public must have confidence in the Government agency that is inspecting the depots and saying that they are safe. There are many such depots around the country, some of them much larger than Buncefield. It does not matter whether the inspection and approval of a facility occurred a week, a year or 10 years before, the public will always wonder why the HSE inspects itself. The public will see that a major part of the inquiry’s remit is to find out what went wrong, but that the HSE was part and parcel of the organisation that said that the depot was safe. They will ask themselves how the HSE can inspect the site and carry out an inquiry—possibly into its own actions—behind closed doors. The situation is extraordinary. We were very lucky that no one died, so the police involvement has essentially been zero, and the HSE has gone ahead with the inquiry. That will take a considerable time, and we are lucky to have an independent chairman, Lord Newton, who has been absolutely brilliant at informing me about what is going on. None the less, like every other member of the public, I have no idea what evidence has been submitted to the inquiry or what is going on. If there were to be a criminal prosecution, however, the organisation that was responsible for the safety of the depot and its workers, as well as that of the residents around it, surely could not be judge, jury and defendant. That is the most difficult thing to grasp, and I do not understand how we can have a situation in the 21st century in which the HSE—a Government agency—investigates the explosion and the subsequent fire when it was so integral to the depot’s safety before the fire. I shall continue to call for a full public inquiry by an independent board to be started as soon as possible. I am not saying that the HSE should not make its expertise available to the board, and perhaps even be part of it, but it is imperative that natural justice is seen to be done when so many of my constituents and others around the country are so worried about the effects of the fire. Let us dwell for a second on how lucky we were. The vapour initially exploded in the car park. A breeze—it was a real act of God—had moved the vapour from beside the tanks, which were in the depot, into the car park, which was just outside it. If the explosion had taken place in the depot, no one there would have survived, and the fire and the explosions that subsequently affected the area would have been even more severe. I think that the inquiry would probably agree with that view; I know that the chief fire officer does Some 31,000 people worked in the industrial area, and the explosion damaged their buildings. Some 2,500 people were evacuated from homes that had been damaged or were in what the fire brigade decided should be an exclusion zone, because there was a risk of further explosions. Just to show how fantastic my community is, I should say that of the 2,500 people who were taken out of their homes, just over 200 were put up by the local authority; the rest were looked after by loved ones and friends in the community of Hemel Hempstead. That clearly shows how well members of the community pulled together. The council did a fantastic job. Many of its staff were way out of their remit and had little experience of such incidents. Let me publicly express my admiration for all the council’s workers, and particularly its senior management, who were absolutely brilliant and whose control room was up and operating very quickly. Organisations such as the women’s institute and the Red Cross were simply fantastic—we could probably have put the fire out with the amount of tea that they supplied. Typically, when this country comes under attack, we pull together, and this was an attack on our community. I want to give colleagues time to speak, so I come now to my last point, which relates to my great concern about the environment in and around my constituency. I am concerned not only about the Buncefield explosion, but about the chemicals that have been found in the environment, which the report clearly indicates have nothing to do with Buncefield. I refer, in particular, to perfluorooctane sulphonate, for which the short name is PFOS. PFOS is a particularly nasty carcinogen used in firefighting foams whose dangers have been known for many years. Before Buncefield, the Government were in what I might best describe as deep negotiations with the European Union about banning PFOS. They had drafted a statutory instrument to do so, which provided for a two-year sentence for those who brought PFOS into the country. Two sorts of foams were used at Buncefield: synthetic foams and protein foams. I shall talk only briefly about synthetic PFOS foams, because my colleagues want to talk about them. However, I continually go on about protein foams, although nobody seems to be listening. Protein foams are often blood based and they have been used for many years. Indeed, I trained with them extensively when I was in the fire service. Protein foam is smelly, horrible stuff because it is based on blood. Blood tends to bubble up rather well, so people who are trying to smother a fire use blood. That might sound silly, but it was the traditional way of doing things. Protein foams were developed extensively during the war because petrochemical ingredients were in short supply. I have deep concerns about protein foams. I know that they were used at the incident, because I saw them there in bulk supply, but it looked as if they had been in storage for a considerable time. As I have said before, I am concerned that some of that foam, which firefighters would never dream of using on anything else and which might have come out of storage, was disposed of at the incident. I have therefore asked the Minister to address a particular issue, although I fully appreciate that the environment is not in his brief and that he might have to write to me. I have asked for undertakings that none of the protein foams that were used were based on full-blood products and that where blood products have leaked into the environment—we already knew of the dangers of blood products in the 20th century—none of the firemen, or anybody else locally, has had their life endangered. I turn now to the issue of synthetic foams, of which PFOS is a major ingredient. Before the Buncefield incident, the Government were trying to ban PFOS, and no level was acceptable in drinking water. Recently, however, the drinking water inspectorate has said that it would be happy to have three parts per million in drinking water. Will the Minister explain the logic of saying that we should have no PFOS one minute, but then suddenly saying that we should have three parts per million? I emphasise that there is no PFOS in the drinking water in Hertfordshire, that the bore holes close to the incident have been closed and that extensive monitoring has taken place. However, that monitoring has shown up another anomaly, which my hon. Friend the Member for South-West Hertfordshire (Mr. Gauke) will describe. The water table in areas with no link at all to the Buncefield incident have been showing extensive signs of PFOS. Where does the Minister think that those contaminants have come from? Will he make sure that testing takes place well away from areas where there is a natural assumption that any contaminants will have come only from firefighting foam? PFOS has been used in pesticides and insecticides in the past, and it might still be used in them. That is a major issue in the rural community outside my new town.