Mesothelioma Lump Sum Payments (Conditions and Amounts) (Amendment) Regulations 2011

Lord German Excerpts

Wednesday 9th March 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Jones]

My Lords, I support the regulations, and I thank the Minister for his considerate and detailed exposition. I certainly welcome all that he said. However, it was daunting to hear of the number of deaths; those details are very sobering. We are all glad that there is compensation—that persons can receive payments of between £12,040 and £77,506. Surely we are all glad that lump sums of between £7,524 and £40,335 can be paid to dependants, and that the Secretary of State of the day can put his signature to these regulations.

This is a dreadful disease. When a diagnosis is made and the facts imparted to the patient, death is usually never far away. It is very good that British Governments can come forward with such compensatory schemes. The regulations are the printed details as referred to in the Explanatory Memorandum. However, they cannot describe adequately the humanity of these desperate cases, or the ignorance which existed then, or the bewilderment, the suffering or the familial anxieties. Surely the departmental staff teams can take some credit, at the very least, for presenting these regulations.

I very much appreciate that the 2008 scheme is wholly funded from compensation recovery, whereas the 1979 Act and 2008 scheme payments are recovered from any subsequent civil damages paid in respect of the same disease. I also understand that consultation is not necessary, because there is no change in policy and no scope to change the outcome, and that these increases are at the rate of inflation as measured by the consumer prices index, in line with other social security benefit rates which are increased under the existing statutory provisions. With regard to regulating small businesses, can the Minister say why the legislation does not apply? Can he, for the record, spell that out?

Finally, there is a history to these regulations. I recollect, first, Mr Harold Walker, the Member of Parliament for Doncaster. He and I served in the Wilson and Callaghan Administrations in the 1970s. Mr Walker was the Minister of State in the Ministry of Employment, as I think it was then called. In that decade the department was very busy and pressured—the old smokestacks fell; the Upper Clyde shipyard was occupied; Rolls-Royce was bankrupted, and then nationalised by the then Mr John Davies MP; the OPEC nations quadrupled the price of oil; and then there came forth a great inflation and many industrial and labour disputes. That was the context whence came the concept that led to these regulations. However, the plight of the workforce in the coal and quarrying fields made it necessary to address these diseases. The menace of asbestos was also demanding compensation.

Harold Walker MP subsequently became Chairman of Ways and Means, then Lord Walker in your Lordships’ House. In his Commons role, he assessed how our departments—the departments for employment and for Wales, in which I served—might jointly address the challenge of those diseases and the demands of families and of sufferers. What should be done in that context of high inflation, industrial labour disputes and all manner of impediments to statecraft, if I may put it like that? There were Ministers looking at these specific problems who wanted very much to address the challenge of these lung diseases.

Mr Walker told me of a tragedy. He had previously been a craftsman and a shop-floor union leader. At a location at Hebden Bridge, he had met workers who had innocently had constant contact with the deadliest of asbestos, which is the blue. Those poor men had literally waded in the blue stuff and kicked it about. They had played snowballs with blue asbestos, throwing the deadly stuff at each other. At that time in our industrial society, nobody had warned them, nobody had briefed them and nobody had considered them. That was taking place across the nation. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, those poor men at Hebden Bridge had frequently gone all the way.

There was no health and safety at work Act. At the time of those great confrontations in British society, as measured in the House of Commons and in disputes throughout the nation, there was a need for consideration about how to make work safer. It was the then Minister, Mr Michael Foot, who brought forward health and safety at work measures. He also brought forward an employment Act. I believe that those measures helped to protect men and women at work. I think that those Administrations who brought them forth and enabled the workforce of Britain to benefit deserve great credit. I would like to put on record that Ministers sought to address these problems brought about by asbestos. I welcome the Minister’s exposition and the team that backs him in enhancing and widening these regulations.

[Lord German]

My Lords, first, I welcome the Minister’s statement this afternoon in respect of these regulations. I thank him for the manner in which he delivered them, the understanding with which he delivered them and, more importantly, the way in which he has supported what has been for many people an almost lifelong campaign to ensure that we bring some retribution for the damage caused to so many members of our society by diseases at work. For me, pneumoconiosis is almost a household name. It became the natural word that would roll off your tongue, especially recently. Visiting constituents and seeing men sitting in the corner of their homes with an oxygen bottle alongside them, the last vestige of their survival as individuals, was a frightening and disgraceful comment upon the nature of our industrial landscape of many years ago. For many of us, it is ingrained within us to see the way those people have been dealt with in such a cruel way by these diseases.

As the Minister pointed out, we have not yet seen the peak of these diseases because, while the industrial heritage may have moved away, the diseases are still firmly implanted within the bodies of those people working within those industries. I welcome the fact that these regulations are being dealt with today and that the Minister has chosen—there is no obligation on the Government to bring forward these regulations—to follow the current practice of uprating on a yearly basis.

There are a number of short questions that I would like to place before the Minister. The first concerns dependants, who have been referred to earlier. Will my noble friend tell us the effect on the gap as a result of the changes we are seeing today? With more and more of these sufferers dying as we reach the peak, the dependants will be becoming more and more dependent upon the payments that are made to them. I wonder whether we have some feel for the direction of travel on that gap at this time. Is there any prospect in future of dealing much more with the dependants? For very tragic reasons, that is where we are going to be ending up with this disease.

My second question concerns the issue of tracking down the employment and the vestiges of the employers. Does the Minister have any knowledge of the split between those who have worked for public sector bodies—in the area where I reside the National Coal Board was probably the biggest problem—and the private sector employers around the country in both the coal and asbestos areas of industry?

No matter how often we come forward with compensation schemes and how much work is done on this matter, and although the changes that have been brought about bring comfort to people, nothing can alter the fact that many in our society have died, and are dying, as a result of industrially related diseases. It is pleasing to note that we have moved on so far in understanding such diseases and what happens in the workplace, and in protecting people. Let us hope that we do not have to introduce any other scheme of this nature in the future.