Mesothelioma Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Wigley and Lord Browne of Ladyton

Wednesday 5th June 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Wigley]

My Lords, I rise to speak very briefly in support of the amendments put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Howarth of Newport, and particularly to address the question of the self-employed which is covered by Amendment 7.

Many people working as jobbers in industries who may undertake patching work in schools or in other buildings where asbestos was involved—perhaps electricians who need to drill into the walls—will have had this exposure. As a consequence, many of them will have suffered, and many will have died. Their need for recognition and for help by way of compensation is as great as that of those who are not self-employed. I understand from where the Government have come on this—this is an agreement with the insurance industry, of course—but that in no way lessens the need and the suffering of those who are self-employed, who might not be the people who the insurance industry would choose to recompense in this way. If that is the case, does it not behove the Government to step in to fill the breach for those who cannot be covered by such a scheme? I simply ask the Government and the Minister to think about that between now and Report.

[Lord Browne of Ladyton]

My Lords, I rise briefly to support both of my noble friend Lord Howarth’s amendments, and I do so—relatively unusually, I think—by referring the Minister to the briefing from the Association of British Insurers which I received about one of my noble friend’s amendments, but not about the other. It is the omission of the other amendment that interests me. However, let me deal with the first one first.

The briefing contains an argument against Amendment 7 which is summarised essentially in one sentence of this short briefing:

“As employers’ liability insurers will be funding the untraced scheme, payments from the scheme will only be made to those who would have been covered by employers’ liability insurance”.

That is the argument that the insurers make and I understand why they make it. The association then goes on to imagine that most people who worked in this industry may have been employed at one time and self-employed at others, and that is probably right—there will have been people who were exposed to these fibres both in an employed and in a self-employed capacity. Because of the way in which these cases are dealt with in the courts, that will not disqualify these people from being included in the payment scheme. However, the association goes on to make a point which I think it believes is crucial to its argument but which actually grossly undermines it. In the last sentence it says:

“There will only be a very small category of people who have been solely self-employed and therefore not eligible for a payment from the untraced scheme”.

Let us assume that the phrase “very small category” is the equivalent of “a very small number”. I am not quite sure why the association used the word category; I think that it means a very small number of people. If indeed that is right, and if indeed we are doing an injustice by excluding a very small number of people from this scheme, that is an argument for extending the scheme to that very small number of people, because it would be grossly—disproportionately—unfair to exclude them.

The second point relates to Amendment 8, which essentially proposes extending the scheme to those who have been exposed in a secondary way to asbestos but through exactly the same route as those who are employed and covered by compulsory employer’s liability insurance, or who would have been covered had it been in existence prior to 1972. That is the way in which the payment scheme is constructed. It strikes me as very odd that the Association of British Insurers does not deal with this issue at all in the brief. As I have listened to the debate unfold in the Grand Committee this afternoon, I have wondered why that was the case. I can certainly figure a set of circumstances where there is a traceable employer and where there is a secondary infection. If a man comes home from the shipyard with fibres on his clothes it does not matter whether they are washed—if the fibres get into the air of the environment in which his children or other relatives live and they breathe them in, they are at risk of developing mesothelioma eventually if these fibres are trapped in the fibres of their lungs.

There must be cases where that negligent act has caused secondary infection and mesothelioma and there has been a successful litigation against the employer of the person who carried the fibres. So there is a chain—a direct link—and the person who would be sued would be the employer.

I do not know the answer to this, because I do not know the details of the employer’s liability compulsory insurance scheme well enough. However, I ask the Minister, if he can tell us at some stage during the course of our deliberations, whether the insurers pick up the payment for the successful litigation because they were the insurers in the employer’s liability policy, or because of public liability insurance, which is a separate and different but compulsory insurance for people who are in workplaces. Either way, this is likely to be the same group of insurers. I suspect that it may be through the route of the employer’s liability compulsory insurance, and if that is correct, may it be the case that this payment scheme already applies to their efforts? I am not sure whether it does or not, but if it definitely does not, it definitely ought to. Since these general insurers, who carried or presently carry the risk of employer’s liability compulsory insurance, are likely to be the same people who are carrying the risk of public liability insurance, I am sure that the Minister can persuade them that it should.