The senior QC who led the inquiry into the Alder Hey stolen organs scandal has been appointed to investigate news that the Sellafield nuclear site secretly stored and tested tissues and organs taken from the bodies of dead employees.

In an emergency statement to the Commons, Alistair Darling, the Trade and Industry Secretary, said that he had asked Michael Redfern to find out "what happened and why".

Mr Darling said that according to medical records held by British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL) tissue samples were taken from 65 deceased employees between 1962 and 1991, most of them employees at Sellafield, in Cumbria.

But he said that the records did not constitute "audit trails" clearly showing who requested or authorised the removal of the samples, although in most cases it appeared to have come at the request of a coroner. Three requests for tissue examination were made as part of legal proceedings and one other request was "made by an individual prior to death".

In four cases, the records do not show who requested that the tissue samples be tested.

Mr Darling said: "The House will appreciate that some of these cases go back 45 years. It is simply not possible therefore today to be sure whether procedures were carried out properly.

"The information held by BNFL as I have said is necessarily limited and a fuller investigation is therefore necessary.

"It is also necessary to establish whether or not these examinations were carried out following the correct and proper procedures and whether the data obtained was used appropriately and with the necessary consents.

He added: "This is clearly a difficult situation covering events that took place up to 45 years ago, nonetheless we owe it to the families as well as to the general public to find out what happened and why.

The minister's statement came after a call by the GMB union for an inquiry into why workers' body parts were removed over a 30-year period and taken to Sellafield, where they were kept in freezers before being examined for radiation. The GMB claims that up to 70 people who worked at Sellafield in the in the 1960s and 70s had tissue, bones and body parts removed for medical examination.

Mr Darling said that the BNFL medical records did not show whether consent had been sought from the dead workers' next of kin for tissue to be taken.

But The Times reported today that the families of the deceased had not been asked for consent, or even informed. It said that the site tested and stores organs including hearts and lungs.

Peter Kane, GMB convenor at Sellafield, said today that people were shocked and needed answers quickly. He said: “We need to know the full facts because until that happens we will never know what has happened. People here are a bit surprised but we can’t really answer a lot of questions. There are issues around patient confidentiality so we may never know.”

A spokesman for BNFL ritish Nuclear Fuels said: “This is an historic issue not a current one, however our prime concern is the feelings of the families of those involved."

The appointment of Mr Redfern was welcomed by the Tories, whose spokesman, Charles Hendry, said that the QC had "exceptional expertise and authority".

Mr Redfern was appointed in 1999 to investigate the scandal of body parts taken from 850 infants who died at the Alder Hey Children's Hospital in Liverpool between 1988 and 1995 at the instigation of a Dutch pathologist who has since been struck off.

His report, published in 2001, created a public outcry by revealing that over 100,000 body parts, organs and even entire foetuses were stored at more than 200 NHS facilities.

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