In May 2003, a year after the rail crash, the families of two Taiwanese young women who died at Potters Bar station made a powerful statement: "It has been a year within which no clear or definite answers have been made public. We have to ask ourselves, is there something to hide? We thought Britain was a cultured civilised and democratic country where human rights were fully respected and social justice upheld. We have been proved wrong."
A further eight years later and the long saga of the Potters Bar rail crash is finally coming to an end after the decision last week to drop the prosecution of Jarvis, now a company in administration. Network Rail, which took on the liabilities of Railtrack, has pleaded guilty to the same charges and will be fined at a subsequent hearing. Fining Network Rail is largely meaningless as the company is hugely subsidised by the taxpayer. The decision to drop charges against Jarvis is hard to fault as the company cannot pay any fine and is not represented, so carrying on with a trial would simply be a waste of public money.
The farcical nature of the criminal proceedings against the companies so long after the crash is the consequence of the failure of accountability at the time it happened. Jarvis and its chairman, Steven Norris, made spurious claims of sabotage and there was a delay of nearly two years before liability was admitted by Network Rail and Jarvis.
Even then the admission was done with bad grace. The government initially delayed making any decision on whether to have a public inquiry until December 2005. The following year Lord Justice Moses refused to overturn this decision after the bereaved families challenged it in court. However, he said that any new evidence should lead to a reconsideration by the government and he stressed the importance of restorative justice: "They (the bereaved) do seek some identification; faces, names, the real people whose anonymity cannot be hidden behind the facade of monolithic organisations." And he continued: "If those individuals, whose actions or omissions might have saved life or contributed to death, fear that they may one day have to come face to face with those who suffer as a result of that they have done or failed to do, life may be protected in the future."
In February 2007 the case for a public inquiry was revived by the Grayrigg train crash, which happened for much the same reasons – that is, the failure of a set of points due to inadequate maintenance. It took successive transport secretaries another three years to decide not to have a public inquiry into both crashes.
Last year there was finally an inquest, instead of the public inquiry the families wanted. Jarvis was not represented, although Norris was called to give evidence about the sabotage claims. The families presented the case for Network Rail to adopt independently verified safety management systems but are still not satisfied that this has happened.
In the years following the Marchioness disaster in 1989 I represented the bereaved families in their long quest for justice, leading to an eventual public inquiry in 2000. Sadly, when I then went on to represent the bereaved families from the Potters Bar rail crash, I found that nothing had changed in relation to the ability of our justice system and governments to deliver accountability over major public health and safety breaches.
We do now have a new corporate killing law, but it specifically excludes the need to prosecute individuals – the people who should be identified – and so far has been used only once against a small company. Health and safety laws allow for the prosecution of company directors as opposed to just the company, but these provisions are never used. The coalition government talks about deregulation of health and safety laws rather than improving them. It is not comfortable to think that in the future, the victims of another disaster are likely again to suffer long drawn-out, insensitive and incompetent redress.
• The author legally represented families bereaved by the Potters Bar rail crash
