Didcot seven years on: no answers, no lessons, no justice

As the investigation into the deaths of four men at a decommissioned power station enters its eighth year, Ian Weinfass speaks to some of those still affected by the tragedy and asks why the industry has received no guidance since

Sadie Cresswell has been waiting for seven years to find out why her father died.

“We knew we’d been in it for the long haul, but after three, four, five years – that’s when the frustration starts and you think, ‘crikey, what are they doing?’

“You think, as long as [the police are] doing a good job we’re going to get justice. But then another six months pass. Before we know it will have been eight, nine, ten years. It’s just not right for it to go on so long,” she says.

Sadie’s father, Ken Cresswell, died on 23 February 2016 along with three other construction workers, following the collapse of the boiler house at Didcot A Power Station.

A joint police and Health & Safety Executive (HSE) investigation was launched in the aftermath, but to this day, there have been no explanations for the loved ones left behind, and no lessons shared with the wider industry to prevent a similar tragedy happening again.

Dragging it out

Ken Cresswell, from Rotherham, South Yorkshire, had worked in demolition since he left school. Aged 57 at the time of his death, he was an experienced demolition worker who loved his job.

Sadie Cresswell, now 31, was 24 when the collapse happened. She describes the married father of three and grandfather of two as “such a family man” with a “wicked sense of humour”.

“I wouldn’t like to be a family now thinking that my dad is going to work in demolition not knowing what happened at Didcot”

Sadie Cresswell, daughter of Ken Cresswell

In an interview with Construction News, she reflects: “Every Friday we would just flood in the house to see him, even though he’d only been gone from Monday. It was like ‘Dad’s home – run, let’s see Dad’, whatever age we were.

“Even now if it’s a Friday in my Mum and Dad’s house, you wait for him. It gets to that time when he’d walk through the door, and then you remember.”

Ken and his wife Gail would have celebrated their 46th wedding anniversary in early February.

“He was very loved. He still is,” Sadie says. “That’s why it’s so important to get us justice. He doesn’t come home to us on a Friday anymore, we don’t get to run to him.”

A total lack of answers about what caused the incident is devastating for the family.

“Every year, every anniversary, every birthday that comes round, you go lay flowers on [his grave] and you say, ‘I’ve got no justice for you here’.

“You feel like you’ve let him down. You feel like they’re letting him down by dragging it out so far. It’s horrible, you feel like you’re living 23 February [the date of the collapse] for seven years.”

Never forget

Tia Huxtable was just 11 when her father Chris Huxtable, 34, from Swansea, died at Didcot.

Her father was another experienced demolition operative, who had been working since his early teens, starting out with his own father in the scrap-metal business.

“My dad was the most loving, heart-warming person you could have ever met. He always had a smile on his face, he worked for his family,” Tia tells CN. “[He] was one in a million and I will never forget him.

“I’m 18 now, I was 11 [at the time] and my heart was ripped to pieces. Seven years on and there’s still no answers, no explanation on why my dad lost his life the way he did.

“I feel as if they’re really dragging their feet. It’s been seven years, there must be some sort of answer.”

Demolition programme

Along with Cresswell and Huxtable, two other men lost their lives at Didcot – John Shaw, 61, and Mick Collings, 53. Five others were injured.

The men were part of a team employed by specialist Coleman & Company, working to bring down a building on the iconic Didcot Power Station in Oxfordshire.

The coal and gas-fired facility was built in the 1960s, but was decommissioned by RWE nPower in early 2013, as part of a shift away from carbon-heavy electricity generation and with a view to selling the land for redevelopment.

After local campaigners failed in a bid to get English Heritage to list the imposing 98-metre-tall cooling towers, work began on demolishing the structures.

Coleman & Company successfully brought three of those down in the summer of 2014, then moved on to other areas of the site, including the boiler house.

The 10-storey high, 100-metre-long building was being prepared for demolition through a process that involved cutting its steel legs to weaken them. Explosives were then meant to bring it down.

At around 4pm on 23 February 2016, a week and a half before the scheduled demolition date, part of the building collapsed.

Mick Collings was found dead shortly afterwards. The bodies of Ken Cresswell, Chris Huxtable and John Shaw were not recovered for months – something that still upsets and confuses the families.

“If it was someone famous under that rubble, they would have been straight in there,” Tia Huxtable says. “Give us a good explanation on why it took so long.”

Police later said that they, alongside the HSE, were investigating potential corporate manslaughter offences, as well as gross negligence manslaughter and serious breaches of the Health and Safety Act.

“There are still huge industrial complexes being demolished. I assume they would use the same basic principles of cutting certain sections… I haven’t heard anybody saying they’re not going to do that”

Howard Button, National Federation of Demolition Contractors

In January 2018, a pre-inquest review hearing was held. The senior investigating officer leading the investigation told the inquest: “A number of individuals and companies suspected of committing offences have been identified and voluntarily interviewed under caution.”

However, no inquest hearings regarding the Didcot tragedy have taken place in public since. Oxfordshire Coroner’s Court declined to comment when approached by CN.

The following month, Thames Valley Police warned that the investigation was incredibly complex and could “take a number of years”.

Very little information has been released since (see box, below).

Coleman & Company has said for years that it does not believe it was responsible for the incident. It repeated the statement in its latest group financial accounts earlier this month, stating its conclusion is based on “rigorous inquiries undertaken by independent specialists and on professional advice”.

It has previously said it wanted to highlight how “industry-wide practices” needed to be “challenged and reviewed” and it wanted to share its own findings with other contractors as soon as it could.

Good lads

“There isn’t a day that goes by that Didcot hasn’t entered into my head,” says Mat Mowat, who was working for Coleman & Company as a supervisor at the time.

“They were all good lads, hard-working men. We never want to forget them. It was just a terrible tragedy. How many times you relive it inside your head, it’s just unbelievable.”

Mowat says he was under the boiler house just moments before the collapse, talking to Chris Huxtable, but was called away to speak to someone else. From not far away, he heard the devastating crash.

“It was like something out of a movie – just chaotic,” he recalls.

“The families need some answers, don’t they? The lads need closure to see something’s been done, and that some lessons have been learned”

Mat Mowat, supervisor at time of the collapse

People were covered in dust, and three “hero” colleagues raced to free a worker whose foot was trapped. Others wanted to search for their lost colleagues almost immediately, he says, although the emergency services did not allow them to.

“It was mayhem. A horrible night. The worst working day of my – and a lot of people’s – lives.”

Mowat estimates that around 20 men were under the boiler house throughout the course of 23 February 2016, and that the incident could have been even more devastating.

He has his views on what went wrong on the job, but he is eager for investigators to announce their official findings.

He says that, in recent years, the only contact he has had from the police is an annual phone call informing him that the investigation continues.

“Somebody’s got to answer the question why did it happen,” he says. “I think it’s ridiculous it’s taken seven years. The families need some answers, don’t they?”

And not just the families. Mowat, 56, adds: “A lot of people need closure. The lads need closure to see something’s been done, and that some lessons have been learned.”

Mowat is open about the incident’s effect on his mental health, deciding to see a psychotherapist for three years after friends and family noticed changes to his personality. And he believes others on the team also suffered.

The Sheffield resident tells CN that he considered quitting the industry in the wake of the incident, as several others he knows did. Ultimately, he decided to continue, although he no longer works for Coleman & Company.

No lessons learned

There are around 10,000 professionals currently working in the demolition industry. And the lack of lessons learned from the incident is something that could be affecting them every day, according to leading industry figures.

National Federation of Demolition Contractors chief executive Howard Button tells CN that the trade body remains unable to issue any guidance to operatives due to the lack of official information received.

“I’d love to be able to put something out. Whatever the situation is, we’ve got to act responsibly on it and we would produce guidance accordingly,” he says.

Producing such guidance could take a year, he adds, because of a lack of any information to start with.

Unless it is supplied with official learnings, he says, the federation cannot issue anything at all as it would not have a sound basis for doing so.

“There are still huge industrial complexes being demolished. I assume they would use the same basic principles of cutting certain sections – they pre-weaken and then blast,” he says.

“I haven’t heard anybody saying they’re not going to do that, there’s probably no other way to demolish some of these mega steel structures.”

And yet, in terms of safety advice, there has been nothing from the HSE, police or any other body.

Sadie Cresswell, who works in construction for a scaffolding training company, says: “You would think people [decision-makers] must think, ‘it’s happened to four men, what’s to stop it happening to 40 men?’. It could happen anywhere, on any demolition site, because nobody knows what happened.

“Absolutely nothing stops this happening again, and that’s absolutely unacceptable. I wouldn’t like to be a family now thinking that my dad is going to work in demolition not knowing what happened at Didcot.”

Button contrasts the UK construction industry’s processes for learning from accidents with those in other sectors and countries.

“We would love to be able to produce information like the airline industry,” he says. “If something happens you want an investigation and it should be done, dusted and then you act accordingly – the [plane crash] in Nepal [in January] might take a year or two to investigate but it won’t take seven, will it?”

He adds that similar cases into fatal incidents at US power station demolition jobs seem to be resolved far more quickly.

“Is it a resource issue? Is it that challenging?” Button asks. “It does raise the question: ‘will we ever get closure?’”

Numbers investigating

The issue of resources at the HSE and its resulting impact on construction is one that CN has highlighted several times over the past few years. In April 2010, the HSE had 1,342 inspectors covering all industries across Britain. By April 2016 the number had fallen to 1,048. In April 2022 it had 1,018.

Last year, then British Safety Council chairman Lawrence Waterman questioned whether budget cuts to the HSE and the police may have had an impact on the investigation. “If you cut the resources you have to investigate industrial accidents, it has consequences. It is inevitably going to have an impact on the investigation of industrial accidents,” he said.

The number of police officers in Thames Valley Police, the lead body in the investigation, fell after 2010 as part of national austerity measures. In October 2019, the Thames Valley Police Federation, the representative body for officers, warned that a shortfall of 40 detectives in the force “on occasion, impacts the public”.

The latest national examination of the force by the policing inspectorate rates it “adequate” at investigating crime and says that as of 31 March 2021 it had no shortfall of detectives.

A Thames Valley Police spokesperson says: “The investigation into the partial collapse at Didcot is almost unprecedented in its scale and complexity, with vast amounts of witness, digital and physical evidence that all need recovering, organising and fully reviewing and analysing, in line with the complex legal requirements.

“A dedicated investigation team has continued to effectively progress this investigation. Resourcing is regularly reviewed by the [senior investigating officer] and the team is currently resourced to effectively progress the ongoing lines of enquiry. This dedicated team will remain in place until a conclusion is reached.”

They add that it is not possible to put a timeframe on how much longer the probe might last, but say: “We can reassure the public that a dedicated investigation team continues to actively and effectively progress numerous lines of enquiry to ensure the necessary decisions can be made and answers can be provided to the families about what happened to their loved ones at Didcot.

“We remain committed to finding answers for the families of the men who tragically died and those affected by the incident.”

An HSE spokesperson says it also continues to have a team dedicated to the investigation.

They add: “Without commenting on what happened at Didcot, the most fundamental action any company that carries out demolition work can take is to use HSE’s long-standing, well-established guidance on safe demolition.

“HSE has worked proactively around demolition to inform and educate industry, independent of the ongoing Didcot investigation, but to date has not needed to specifically issue a safety alert in relation to the partial collapse at Didcot.”

The watchdog continues to share learning from investigations into incidents “when necessary and appropriate”, they add.

‘Just’ demolition men

For Sadie Cresswell, the individual police officers her family have dealt with have been helpful, but the slow pace of the system as a whole is a source of deep frustration.

However, she notes that Didcot has not stayed in the public consciousness as much as some other tragedies that have occurred since.

The 2017 Grenfell Tower fire, which is also still the subject of a police investigation, has seen a public inquiry detail evidence about what happened, as well as ministerial statements and changes to the law. A July 2016 incident in which four men were killed when a wall collapsed at a Birmingham recycling centre led to an inquest in 2018, and trials of those held responsible took place last year.

Cresswell reflects: “Because Didcot is on the backburner the vibe you get is – [they were] just demolition men.”

But, overall, she says: “We’ve got no choice but to trust the process. If the police can’t deliver you justice, who can?”

Until the results of the investigation are announced, relatives and much of the demolition industry have no choice other than to continue to wait.