The Dutch building sector has been prioritising price over safety for years and has repeatedly failed to learn lessons from earlier accidents, an investigation into the partial collapse of a multi-storey car park has revealed.

The Dutch safety board, which has been investigating various incidents over the past few years, said building companies are more concerned with shifting the blame than with improving safety, current affairs programme EenVandaag reported.

The board found that the cause of the collapse of the car park at Eindhoven airport in May this year was not due to a technical failure, as had been claimed in an earlier report, but to a design fault.

Various construction workers barely escaped with their lives when the car park collapsed a month before completion. The safety board says earlier signs that the construction was unsafe, such as cracked floors and puddles of water, were ignored.

The fact that time was running out and costs were mounting put too much pressure on the project, the board concluded.  That meant that ‘a climate existed in which limiting losses and planning constraints took priority,’ EenVandaag quoted the report as saying.