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Published: 06 January 2011
by RICHARD OSLEY and TOM FOOT

PRIVATE contractors who botched work on a council estate wall which later collapsed and killed a two-year-old boy were left by the Town Hall to check the standard of their own work.

Camden Council did “little or nothing” to find out whether the work had been completed properly and relied on “assumptions” before the death of Saurav Ghai in January 2007, Southwark Crown Court was told this week.

Four years after the tragedy, the council now agree that the boundary wall on the Wendling Estate in Southampton Road, Gospel Oak did not meet good practice standards in building.

Saurav died soon after being crushed under the falling bricks as he walked with a childminder to the family home in Belsize Park.

The council has pleaded guilty to a breach of safety at work legislation after a case was brought against them by the Health and Safety Executive. 

But lawyers have spent the past two days engaged in a session known as a “Newton Hearing”, in front of a judge sitting without a jury, to decide the extent to which the council was at fault.

Saurav’s parents, Vinay and Desiree Ghai, have sat in court listening to the evidence of surveyors. They have already faced the pain of listening to details of their son’s death at a string of court hearings and also at a full coroner’s inquest.

In the aftermath of the tragedy, the couple made a donation to the Royal Free Hospital unit that tried to save their son’s life.

A key point of this week’s hearing is whether the council could have done more to discover defects in the wall.

The court heard that panels were not “tied” or “keyed in” properly after a repair to the brickwork in 1997, but the council argue that this could not have been detected without an invasive inspection and that they had to put trust in the firm hired to do the work. Dominic Kay, defending, said the council had the right to expect it had hired a “competent and experienced” contractor.

Council staff, the court was told, simply made a visual inspection of the wall after the contractors claimed to have finished the work. This was only to see that the site had been left tidy and that there were no glaring problems in the wall’s construction.

The contractors at the centre of the case, named in court as Chatterton, as they were at the inquest two years ago, are no longer used by the council and, 14 years after their attempt to fix the wall, are not listed at Companies House.

The council are accused of not making more effort to ensure the wall’s safety for their own staff and passers-by.

The original wall was a half-brick thick – considered “close to the limitations of slenderness” for its height by Paddy Campbell, a former team surveyor at Camden Council.

But he told the court that the type of wall was “not uncommon” in London and elsewhere and that he thought it met standards set by the Greater London Council (GLC) when it was first designed in the 1970s.

“I didn’t design the wall and it wasn’t our job to redesign it when we ordered repairs,” he said.

Mr Campbell was working for Camden at the time of Chatterton’s repair work in 1997 but he had no involvement in the repair and has no connection with the panel that collapsed on Saurav. Lawyers for both sides stressed there was no criticism of him and his evidence on Tuesday was simply to establish  Camden’s work systems.

He said at the time, the council only checked 1 in 10 of repair jobs which cost under £1,000 – chosen by “pot luck” – after they were completed. 

Mr Campbell said the short visual inspections would have involved a quick check to see sites had been left tidy, that there was no obvious problems, and that the wall would probably have been given a push like “kicking tyres after you’ve pumped them up”.

He said it was companies such as Chatterton who were paid extra to supervise the standard of their work and ensure that they followed good practice.

Mr Campbell said the council’s staff “do not have X-ray eyes” to see inside the wall.

“Part of the cost of the work was the supervision by the contractors,” he said from the witness box. “It is part of the prelims [preliminary terms in their contract with the council] when Camden hires a company.”

Historically, the council had its own in-house repairs team which monitored and checked the standard of work.

“When CCT came in, that’s compulsory competitive tendering in the 1990s, companies that were hired were expected to have the same responsibilities. We were told that the contractors in the private sector  had the same responsib­ilities,”   said Mr Campbell.

From memory, he said that he could recall Chatterton’s staff as possibly being called “Arthur” or “Les”.

Mr Kay said the council could not be expected to stand over workers on every repair job.

He asked: “They couldn’t be man-marked, could they?”

Mr Campbell replied: “You could, but the cost would be unreasonable.”

Patrick O’Neil, programme manager at Camden Council, told the court yesterday that Chatterton had come through a “robust” tendering process.

He said: “We were satisfied of their expertise. We had no reason to doubt them. It was a fair position for us to have relied on them to build a wall.”

Another part of the wall had blown over four years earlier, the court heard, but contractors were only ever asked to rebuild it to the original specification – not to any new building regulations.

At the time of Saurav’s death, Camden Council was in the middle of a stock condition survey of its estates in the area and, as part of a sample check, the wall at Wendling was looked at by consultants, Savills, in the months before the collapse.

Nicholas Bradley, who at that time worked for Savills, told the court cracks were discovered but the wall was not considered at immediate risk of collapsing. He recommended that the council spent £400 on a wider survey.

James Ageros, prosecuting, said: “Between the date when the wall was repaired in 1997 and January 18 2007, the defendant was in breach of its duty. The wall was built extremely badly and not in accordance with good practice. The issue is, and the issue throughout this case, will be not whether this wall was built properly in the first place, but whether Camden was at fault for not realising that it was not properly built.”

He said: “They did little or nothing to exercise control over the work.”

In the days following his death, Saurav’s parents described their son as “a beautiful boy smiling from the day he was born”.

The hearing continues.