Cameron House Hotel and New County Hotel tragedies show the need to give fire safety inspectors stronger enforcement powers – Jackie Baillie

The deadly fire at the Cameron House Hotel on Loch Lomond was one of the toughest and most heartbreaking events I have had to deal with in my 23 years as MSP for Dumbarton. But tragically it has not been an isolated incident.

Having damped the flames of such incidents too many times before, weary Scottish Fire and Rescue Service investigators have now had to turn their attention to the blaze at the New County Hotel in Perth which tragically claimed the lives of three people.

The fire on January 2 was an awful beginning to the New Year. Sisters Donna Janse Van Rensburg and Sharon McLean, who were both from Aberdeen, were killed in the hotel fire alongside Keith Russell, 38, who was originally from Edinburgh. The investigation is still ongoing but it is a matter of record that there were numerous complaints about the hotel beforehand from customers and those who try to keep us safe in our homes and in the places we travel.

It is staggering to learn that the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service had made recommendations for 21 improvements to fire safety at the hotel in December, a month before the blaze. But, short of shutting premises down completely, fire officers appear to have little power to intervene other than to issue a list of what proprietors ought to do. There is a massive gap in the current fire enforcement regulations which would force proprietors to take action.

The Perth fire was a horrible reminder of the Cameron House Hotel blaze in my own Dumbarton constituency. Simon Midgley, 32, and his partner Richard Dyson, 38, died in a fire at Cameron House on December 18, 2017. The alarm was raised at 6.40am but not until 8.09am was it established that they were unaccounted for. The couple died from inhalation of smoke and fire gases.

The guest list had been left in reception due to human error by the night manager. It was later retrieved by a member of the fire service. The fire started after the hotel’s night porter, Christopher O’Malley, emptied ash and embers from a fireplace into a polythene bag and placed it in a cupboard which contained combustibles.

Again, the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service had earlier issued warnings, quite specific ones, to the hotel operator over the storing of combustibles. And they did so on several occasions, but without stronger enforcement powers there was little they could do in the way of follow through. As a result, there was a needless loss of life. In the subsequent court case, the hotel operator admitted failing to take the fire safety measures necessary to ensure the safety of employees and guests while the staff member admitted breaching sections of health and safety laws.

There had been a previous coroner’s court inquest in England which found the couple’s deaths to be unlawful. But it took a long fight by Jane Midgley, Simon’s mother, to get the Crown Office in Scotland to have a fatal accident inquiry.

Emergency services at the scene at the New County Hotel in Perth where three people died following a fire (Picture: Robert Perry/PA Wire)

As the constituency MSP, I backed her efforts and the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service U-turned on an earlier decision not to hold a fatal accident inquiry. Sheriff Thomas McCartney delivered his determination this last week and it makes pretty grim reading for those who lost loved ones. Reasonable precautions could have been taken which could have prevented the fire, and therefore, the deaths from happening, according to the determination.

Defects found which contributed to the deaths included the careless disposal of ash, lack of a written procedure and equipment for disposal, ash bins being full and the absence of instruction on what staff should do when they were full, and the presence of combustibles in the concierge cupboard. What is so damnable is that these are echoes of the recommendations that the fire service produced for Cameron House Hotel to prevent just such an event happening. From the court case last year, the families of Simon Midgley and Richard Dyson already know that their deaths were avoidable.

It is imperative that all the lessons from the two tragic hotel fires are learned. It is even more vital that the outcome of the fatal accident inquiry leads to clear guidelines and strengthened powers for fire officers with an escalating scale of penalties if proprietors do not follow through on basic safety recommendations.

No parent should have to deal with the loss of their own child. We owe it to the families of Simon Midgley and Richard Dyson to ensure that tragedies such as the Cameron House Fire never occur again.

The Scottish fire service has some of the best investigators in the world but as any firefighter will tell you, they would rather be in the business of preventing fires than turning up to put them out, then raking through the ashes to reach the foregone conclusions.

Measures have been put in place following the Loch Lomond fire but the intolerable conclusion from both events is that the failings at Cameron House were not made good and the prior warnings given by the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service to the New County Hotel appear not to have been heeded quickly enough.

The findings of any official inquiry will not take away the heartache suffered as a result of the deaths in these two tragedies. But action to give fire safety inspectors proper enforcement powers might avoid other families having to suffer in similar circumstances.

From the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital scandal to the fires in Perth and on Loch Lomond, it is clear that action is needed to put the families of those affected by tragedy at the heart of the search for answers.

Jackie Baillie is MSP for Dumbarton, Scottish Labour’s deputy leader and her party’s spokesperson for health