Senior council officers admitted better support could have been provided for victims of the New Ferry gas explosion.

The explosion, in 2017, at the Homes In Style shop injured 81 people and devastated New Ferry.

Speaking at last night’s council meeting, Labour Councillor Tony Norbury said: “Some people are saying mental health support is still needed now. Did the council identify additional needs of victims? Are specialist mental health services now needed?

“Victims found it difficult to have one-to-one interviews in private. I think that’s really needed, because people will want to disclose private situations and if they’re not given the facility to do that, that will just add to the mental health problems that we’re seeing.”

Mark Camborne, Head of Corporate & Community Safety at Wirral Council, said: “There are pretty clear tried and tested plans from all the agencies that make up that multi-agency response. The Life Church, where the survivor reception centre opened (a facility the community themselves opened ) we supported it the best we could in terms of assisting them.

“There were ambulance crews and medic in that facility at least for the first 24/36 hours, dealing with people who were presenting at the life centre Also, there were a number of people who self-presented to A&E and the walk-in centres.

“The more latent issues around medium to long term mental health conditions, we would hope and expect that those are picked up at local GPs and people presenting themselves, but I’m aware that there were health representatives at all the public meetings during the recovery phase, or certainly most meetings during the recovery phase.”

This response did not satisfy a number of councillors at the meeting.

Cllr Norbury added: “So what you’re saying is that additional mental health support and provision was not available, it was just through their own GPs?”

Mr Camborne said: “The on-call commander of the NHS is aware of that incident and they put plans in place to deal with that. There was a recognition in this report that people who provide mental health support maybe could have done more.”

Labour Councillor Christina Muspratt also expressed concern on the handling of mental health issues arising from the explosion.

“What I am concerned about is that even without any medical knowledge we would all assume that people who are around and suffer during an explosion will have been affected, whether it manifests itself in terms of family arguments, money worries, bus issues etc.

“At that point we must have something in place that signposts people to the right places so people are aware of what that stress is.”

Focusing on the officer’s claim that those affected should go to GPs themselves, Cllr Muspratt said: “People don’t go to the doctors until the problem manifests itself far more strongly. That’s where we could have gone in and signposted to all the agencies out there.”

Supporting this stance, Conservative Councillor Andrew Gardner said: “Speaking as a survivor of an explosion myself, I fully appreciate how PTSD works, I have PTSD. I don’t think for one minute people who suffer with mental conditions are going to go down to see their GP, it has to be an automatic support mechanism.

“The Local GP hasn’t got the facilities to support that. The NHS isn’t going to be able to support 120 people with mental health issues turning up the next day.”

Chairing the meeting, Liberal Democrat Councillor David Mitchell said that mental health support is referred to in the recommendations listed on the report analysing the response to the disaster.

Councillors on all sides of the chamber wanted to make sure that automatic mental health support would be offered to all victims of any similar catastrophe in the future.

Conservative Councillor Tony Cox said: “As part of the recommendations that needs to be explicitly stated.”