Judge rules that birth defects could have been caused by toxic waste from steel works

Sixteen young people who claim that their birth defects were caused by a “soup of toxic materials” created when the local council reclaimed the site of the former British Steel works in Corby, Northamptonshire, have scored a landmark victory in the High Court in London.

Mr Justice Akenhead ruled that Corby Borough Council was negligent and in breach of its statutory duty in carrying out the reclamation and that a cluster of limb defects could have been caused by the toxic airborne dust that blanketed the town.

Unless the council settles the claims out of court, further hearings will be necessary to decide whether each individual defect was caused by the council’s breaches, which could take a further two or three years.

The council said it was “surprised and disappointed” by the judgment. It was considering its position and would discuss the issue at a special council meeting on 18 August.

The judge said that the council had been “extensively negligent” between 1983 and August 1997 in the control and management of the sites it had acquired from British Steel Corporation after the works closed down in 1980.

There had been “extensive dispersal of contaminated mud and dust over public areas of Corby and into and over private homes,” with the result that the contaminants could realistically have caused the types of birth defects that the young people experienced.

The clean up was the largest reclamation to be undertaken in Europe at the time. The council, the judge said, “bit off more than it could chew and did not really appreciate the enormity, ramifications, and difficulty of what it was setting out to achieve in terms of removing and depositing very substantial quantities of contaminated material.”

Claims were lodged by 18 young people born between 1986 and 1999, most of whom have shortened or missing arms, legs, and fingers. The judge said there was no doubt that the contaminants present—cadmium, chromium, nickel, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and dioxins—could cause similar birth defects in animals, and there was no reason to think they could not be caused in human embryos or fetuses in the early stages of pregnancy.

However, he ruled that the birth defects of the youngest two claimants, who were born in 1999, were not caused by the contamination.

The claimants’ solicitor, Desmond Collins, who took on the case on a no win, no fee basis, said, “It was clear at all times that the local authority had made a complete mess of this land reclamation programme

“They made the children suffer for 10 years in this fight, which was totally unnecessary.”