Police Scotland have admitted failings which “materially contributed” to the death of a young mother who lay undiscovered in a crashed car with her partner for three days after the incident was reported to police.
The force on Tuesday pleaded guilty to health and safety breaches relating to the deaths of John Yuill, 28, and Lamara Bell, 25.
The pair died after their car crashed off the M9 near Stirling in July 2015. Despite a call being made to police to alert them to the crash, it took officers three days to respond.
When they finally arrived at the scene, Mr Yuill was found to be dead but Ms Bell was still clinging to life. She died four days later in hospital.
READ MORE: Police Scotland faces legal action over M9 deaths
It later emerged that a phone call taken at the force call-handling centre at Bilston Glen Service Centre which described the crash and the location of the car was not recorded by the Police IT system.
At the High Court in Edinburgh on Tuesday, the office of the Chief Constable of Police Scotland admitted that it's call handling system had been at fault.
The scene of the crash
It also failed to ensure the system was “not vulnerable to unacceptable risks arising from human error”, and to ensure that all relevant information reported by members of the public was recorded so that it could be considered and a police response provided where appropriate.
The force admitted that because of thes failings, members of the public were exposed to risks to their health and safety.
Police Scotland accepted that on July 5, 2015, a police officer at the force call-handling centre at Bilston Glen Service Centre failed to record a phone call from a member of the public reporting that a vehicle was at the bottom of an embankment at the side of the eastbound junction nine slip road from the M80 on to the M9.
Chief Constable Iain Livingstone
The indictment says the phone call was not recorded on any Police Scotland IT system and the failure went unnoticed with “no proper consideration of the report and no opportunity for an appropriate response from Police Scotland”.
READ MORE: Concern as 260,000 calls to the police do not reach an operator
The force admitted Ms Bell and Mr Yuill remained “unaided and exposed to the elements” in the car between July 5 and 8, 2015 and that the failings “materially contributed” to her death on July 12 that year at the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow.
The court heard Mr Yuill and Ms Bell went on a camping trip with friends on Saturday July 4 2015 to Loch Earn.
Mr Yuill, who held a provisional licence, was driving his car, supervised by a friend with a full licence.
The following morning he drove off in his car with Ms Bell, leaving the others sleeping.
When they failed to return home by evening, their parents called police to report them missing.
Mother-of-two Lamara Bell
Ashley Edwards QC, prosecuting, told the court a member of the public noticed a blue car partly obscured by bushes off the M9 motorway and called police at 11.29am on July 5 to report it.
She said: “The call handler did not create an incident for this call on the Storm system. He made a note of it in his book but the information was not transferred to Storm.”
She added: “The M9 call handler said an incident should have been created in Storm.”
The court heard that on July 8 another member of the public noticed a blue car at the bottom of the embankment and went to investigate.
Ms Edwards said: “On closer inspection he saw it was a blue car with two occupants. He saw a female moving her arms and moaning. She said, ‘help me, get me out’ and he tried to reassure her and called 999.”
Emergency services attended and Ms Bell, who was in the passenger seat, was airlifted to hospital with serious injuries, while Mr Yuill was pronounced dead at the scene.
The force pleaded guilty to breaching the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974.
Sir Stephen House, who was chief constable at the time of the incident, stepped down from the role at the end of 2015 following controversy over the deaths.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereLast Updated:
Report this comment Cancel