Families slam lifeboat delay

Families of the victims of the Marchioness tragedy have criticised the time lapse between the accident and today's launch of the first lifeboats on the Thames as "disgraceful".

The introduction of a 24-hour lifeboat service, as revealed in the Evening Standard last week, comes 12 years after 51 partygoers died when the pleasure cruiser collided with a dredger and sank in August 1989.

Today, Margaret Lockwood Croft, whose son Shaun died in the river aged 26, hit out at the delay in providing a rescue boat service. "It has taken the death of 51 people for this to happen," she said, adding: "We have had to campaign hard for 12 years to make it happen. It is disgraceful this has taken so long. It could have been set up within two years of the disaster but we had to wait this long to get permission from the Transport Department."

The lack of a lifeboat service on the Thames was condemned by the inquiry into the tragedy. Today Transport Minister John Spellar is due to launch the first of seven Royal National Lifeboat Institution boats, designed to arrive within 15 minutes of being alerted to an incident.

Eileen Dallaglio, whose daughter Francesca was the youngest to die, aged 19, said: "I was never going to give up on trying to help make something positive out of this disaster."