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'Disaster had big influence on government's policies'
Sheffield MPs Clive Betts, David Blunkett and Richard Caborn all have vivid memories of the Hillsborough disaster, which left 96 Liverpool fans dead.
They spoke to Westminster Reporter Mark Hookham on the eve of the 20th anniversary of the tragedy
CLIVE Betts witnessed the horror of the Hillsborough tragedy from a seat in the directors' box.
Like many in the stadium on that spring day 20 years ago, Mr Betts, then Labour leader of Sheffield Council, saw a disaster unfold in confused slow motion.
"The game kicked off and there was what looked like crowd problems. Then people starting climbing over the fences to get out.
"There were more and more people trying to get out. The referee stopped the game and the players walked off.
"It took a long time for the scale of disaster to become apparent, for people to realise that people were dead on the pitch, that there was resuscitation going on.
"People were absolutely stunned. Things like this don't happen at football matches," he said.
As a big Wednesday fan, Mr Betts, now the MP for Attercliffe, was often invited to high-profile games at Hillsborough.
The previous year he had watched another FA Cup semi-final, also between Nottingham Forest and Liverpool.
On that occasion he remembers being taken on a tour of the stadium by South Yorkshire Police before the game and being impressed by the crowd control arrangements in place.
He said: "They had a cordon of police officers before the Leppings Lane end which filtered people through the turnstiles.
"I didn't do a tour on the day of the disaster but we now know that the arrangements of the previous year were not repeated."
David Blunkett was sitting in the lounge of his Handsworth home on the afternoon of April 15, 1989, when he heard a cacophony of sirens.
Fire engines and ambulances from across South Yorkshire were racing down Sheffield Parkway to attend.
Mr Blunkett had been elected as the Brightside MP two years previously and – despite its name – his constituency includes the Hillsborough stadium.
READ MORE: Two-minute silence as city marks the anniversary quietly
On hearing the sirens the 41-year-old MP immediately called the council chief executive and the chief constable's office to find out what was happening.
Later that evening he went to the Northern General Hospital to help comfort some of the 300 hospitalised survivors.
"At the Northern General there were young men who were injured but not severely.
"I'm afraid it was one of those tragedies where, because of the nature of the crushing, you were very lucky to be injured and alive," he said.
Dr Margaret Williams, Mr Blunkett's fiancee, was with survivors at the Royal Hallamshire Hospital having answered an urgent appeal which had been broadcast on local radio and TV for off-duty doctors and nurses to help out.
Mr Blunkett added: "What was astonishing and needs to be remembered was the tremendous response of Sheffield people.
"They opened up their homes to Liverpool supporters immediately afterwards.
"There were no mobile phones or computers – people desperately wanted to get messages home that they were safe, or if they were injured they were at least walking.
"Some of the Liverpool supporters were actually taken back to Liverpool by car by Sheffield people because they just couldn't face the journey."
The following day Mr Blunkett visited the stadium, where the relatives of victims were beginning to arrive at a temporary morgue in a gymnasium beneath the stands.
"I remember it for the sheer silence," he said.
Sheffield Central MP Richard Caborn was at the match, accompanying Merseyside MP George Howarth.
He said: "It was the most eerie experience I'd ever had.
"I was on the terrace and saw one of the bars which was supposed to keep crowds from surging forward. It was bent and I was told it would have taken something like quarter of a tonne to have done that."
Both Mr Blunkett and Mr Caborn say witnessing the aftermath of the disaster had a profound influence on them when they later became ministers in the Labour government.
Mr Blunkett used lessons learnt from Hillsborough when he was tasked as Home Secretary with drawing up so-called "resilience plans" for terror attacks and other civil disasters. He said: "Some of the lessons from Hillsborough have been put into the planning guidance and the work done on any potential civil disasters in future.
"We learnt about the critical importance of knowing who is in charge, the very clear lines of responsibility, the ability of people on the ground to make decisions quickly without having to refer up and the vital nature of ensuring that people who are in charge are the ones who have done the planning. The tragedy of 20 years ago was that those who had previously been involved with and had experience in handling very major events and crowds of this sort weren't actually on duty."
Hillsborough convinced Mr Caborn, later Tony Blair's sports minister, that terraces should never return to English football.
"It had a major affect on me when I was sports minister. There had been an ongoing debate about terraces. Anyone who had been there would have to think very, very hard about that."
Lord Chief Justice Taylor's public inquiry concluded the main reason for the disaster was "failure of police control."
It made a total of 76 recommendations for preventing a repeat, including the introduction of all-seater stadiums.
Two decades later and women and children attend top matches in numbers that would have been unthinkable in the 1970s and 1980s.
Mr Betts, who was a member of the South Yorkshire Police Authority at the time, said: "It was not just the policing but the control of football which changed.
"The emphasis now is on the safety of all spectators. Specific measures are taken to deal with the small minority of hooligans and not all fans."
But he acknowledges that many of the victims' families were left angry that those at fault on the day were not prosecuted.
Mr Blunkett said the tragedy had a 'devastating effect' for years on the morale of South Yorkshire Police.
"I'm so relieved now that we can commemorate the anniversary without damaging the standing of the police. We ought to commemorate the 20th anniversary by acknowledging the risk of death and injury in football has been dramatically reduced."
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