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 "progressing steadily" and should be submitted to the Panel in October. The final draft was not circulated until 30 March 1989,16 days before this disaster.

Meanwhile, the Safety Certificate has remained unamended since 1979. The enlargement of the Kop in 1986 increased its capacity to 21,000. Although this was known and agreed by the Council it had not been the subject of any change in the certificate which still showed the capacity of the Kop as 16,850. Mr Mackrell, Sheffield Wednesday's Secretary, raised the question of amendments to the Safety Certificate and in particular with regard to the Kop in April 1987 with Eastwood and Partners but nothing resulted.

Sheffield United Football Club was designated under the 1975 Act on 3 July 1984. A Safety Certificate was about to be issued by South Yorkshire County Council at the time it handed over to the Sheffield City Council on 1 April 1986. No certificate has yet been issued to Sheffield United.

The explanation given for these delays was pressure of work. Mr Bownes as Chief Licensing Officer was responsible for 32 other licensing systems when this one was added to his burden. He had a staff of only five. I fully accept that the addition of further statutory responsibilities to the already heavy workload of a local authority with curbs on its expenditure creates problems. But it is clear that the attention given to this important licensing function was woefully inadequate.

Summary

The Safety Certificate contained no maximum figures for individual pens. There was therefore no sanction or provision focussing attention as to the need to limit entry to the pens by numbers. The layout at Leppings Lane as it evolved made electronic or mechanical control over numbers entering individual pens impracticable if all pens were to be available. Given an important match and a capacity attendance, fans were likely to crowd into popular sections like pens 3 and 4. Those pens were likely to become overfull well before warning came from the turnstiles that numbers were approaching the terrace maximum of 10,100. Control over numbers and the avoidance of overcrowding therefore depended entirely on visual monitoring of the crowd. Rh