NHS waste firm boss hits out at 'flawed' court case

A businessman accused of illegally storing medical waste, including human body parts, has said he will take legal action after the case was dropped.

Garry Pettigrew had been on trial facing claims his now defunct firm Healthcare Environmental Services had breached rules on safe waste storage.

But, nearly a year into the trial, prosecutors said the case had been dropped after a review of the evidence.

Mr Pettigrew told BBC Scotland News "the case was flawed from day one".

The businessman said he was "going to be suing a lot of people" after he claimed his reputation was "trashed" by the prosecution, while his firm had been made what he said was a "public scapegoat" for a lack of incineration capacity.

About 400 jobs were lost when Healthcare Environmental Services (HES), based in Shotts in North Lanarkshire, went bust in 2019 after being embroiled in a waste stockpiling scandal.

The company was stripped of NHS contracts after hundreds of tonnes of clinical waste piled up at its sites.

Mr Pettigrew said the problems were caused by a shortage of incinerators across the UK rather than the company's actions.

The prosecution case against the businessman at Hamilton Sheriff Court had closed and Mr Pettigrew had given evidence on his own behalf.

The businessman's legal team had still to call three defence witnesses when the case was dropped with Mr Pettigrew estimating, based on his own legal fees, that it has cost the taxpayer about £2m.

He said: "This case should never have been brought forward.

"They've tried to destroy me. The last few years have been very difficult, they made me into a public scapegoat.

"They have trashed my reputation and I'm unemployable. No-one could go near me."

Mr Pettigrew said he had been flagging up the shortage of incineration capacity for NHS waste for years before the UK government announced that HES had "significantly and repeatedly breached its environmental permits by storing excess waste at a number of its sites" and was to be stripped of its health service contracts.

Mr Pettigrew denied this was the case and suggested that his firm was used as a scapegoat because the UK government "did not want to admit they had nowhere for incineration waste-only to go".

The sheriff court trial had previously heard that it took contractors nearly a year to clear 391 tonnes of waste, which included human body parts and a dead penguin, from the HES Shotts depot.

Photographs shown to the court included one of a penguin carcass which was said to have come from Edinburgh Zoo.

Other photographs shown included tubs date-marked 2017 which contained human body parts from NHS sites across Scotland.

Also during the trial, a senior manager at Scottish Environment Protection Agency (Sepa) was forced to withdraw a claim given in her evidence that Mr Pettigrew had told the watchdog "it was his intention to deposit waste back in hospital car parks".

A Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service spokesperson said: "It is the duty of the Crown to keep cases under review, and following full and careful consideration of the facts and circumstances of the case, including the available admissible evidence, the procurator fiscal decided that there should be no further criminal proceedings at this time."

Sepa said it had submitted the original report which sparked the prosecution of Mr Pettigrew "following significant regulatory effort at HES sites".