ONE of the benefits of the tribunal of inquiry into the airport firefighter dispute is that documents that would otherwise have remained unpublished or unwritten are now in the public domain.

Among them are the so-called Burchill report, an independent paper produced in 2008 into the difficulties experienced by airport management over recruitment and retention of firefighters.

Requests for the release of a publicly-funded document were consistently rejected by the Public Services Department and now that the report is available on the tribunal’s website, it is clear that refusal had no validity. It was secrecy for secrecy’s sake.

The report is critical of the Public Sector Remuneration Committee, in part for its out-dated, confrontational and adversarial approach to negotiating, and showed there was a building industrial relations problem but was hardly disclosing sensitive material.

Another document now available is a statement prepared by Dick Taylor, the former industrial disputes officer, which  touches on how a staffing issue with the HSSD was allowed to escalate into a major issue.

Mr Taylor’s concerns about the matter led to him making, with the knowledge and advice of the Crown Officers, a formal complaint in 2007 about the conduct of the chairman and chief officer of the PSRC.

Another paper released is a letter from the current deputy industrial disputes officer which indicates that when the airport dispute was also becoming critical she asked the PSD minister what could be done to bring the matter back from the brink, in the knowledge that an industrial tribunal to resolve the closure could take up to 10 days to organise.

She notes: the PSD minister deferred to the chairman of the PSRC, who deferred to his officers – who said nothing could be done.

What all this shows is that the faults and deficiencies of the PSRC were well known, but nothing was done about it, and the PSD minister and the chair of the PSRC were well aware the airport could close for 10 days but were not prepared to do anything about it.

The role of the inquiry panel is now not so much to explain how these things could happen  but to propose how they can be prevented from happening again.