Mesothelioma Bill [Lords]

Debate between Jim Sheridan and Iain McKenzie

Tuesday 7th January 2014 Commons Chamber

[Jim Sheridan]

I speak as a former ship worker on the Clyde. I have seen at first hand the pressure that was brought to bear on employees who worked in and around asbestos and whose jobs were threatened if they refused to work with it. It was only with the support of the trade unions and the health and safety part of those unions that we managed to get that pressure taken off the employees and to give them the protective clothing they had so long deserved.

I do not think that I am the only person in this House who has had a visit from someone who has been diagnosed with mesothelioma. We can see the desperation in their eyes when they know that they do not have long to live and the only thing that keeps them going is the fact that they can get some compensation, not for them but for their families. That is the important thing. The most graphic description of mesothelioma I have heard was from a victim who told me that it was like a tree growing inside you which eventually chokes you to death. That is the kind of death we are seeing, and it is somewhat disappointing.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne East (Mr Brown) talked about Scotland and pleural plaques. The Scottish Government took a different road and were successful in the courts in pursuing compensation for those with pleural plaques, but just for the record, no one in Scotland has received a single penny of that compensation because the insurance industry has now taken the matter through the European Court of Human Rights.

People will have different views of the insurance industry, but I personally have a very toxic view. That is based on my own experience some years ago in Scotland, where there is a different legal system. Then, when people were diagnosed with any asbestos-related disease, their claim died with them. The insurance companies would go to court and have sitting beside them a doctor who would, from a distance, try to gauge how long the person had to live, and the companies would then find some sort of technical reason to get their case put back or delayed in the hope that they would die and their claim would die with them. That is the reason for my toxic view of the insurance industry.

I spoke about the cut-off date on Second Reading, and my opinion has in no way changed. The consultation in 2010 was extremely clear in its intention, and the industry’s very competent public relations people—perhaps the hon. Member for Chatham and Aylesford (Tracey Crouch) might have been one of them—picked up on this issue immediately. There is no doubt that the companies have been preparing for the scheme since the day the consultation was launched, and there is no reason why we should be letting them set the agenda in this way. The rights of victims are being completely ignored by the arbitrary setting of a cut-off date in 2012. The argument that basing the legislation in 2010 is

“unlawful interference with insurers’ property rights”

does not give due importance to the rights of the victims. Having more money should not buy someone more rights, though under this Government that seems to be exactly the case. Nor do I believe the argument about the initial spike in payments. Insurance companies would have put money aside to alleviate the risk of making those payments, and even if they did not, the payments would be a drop in the ocean for this multi-billion-pound industry, which can easily afford to make them.

Between February 2010 and 25 July 2012, an extra 700 people will have died as a result of mesothelioma, and they should not have had to suffer due to the insurance industry dragging its feet. This proposal is affordable within the Government’s figures and, more importantly, it is fair.

[Mr Iain McKenzie (Inverclyde) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend and I come from the same area of the Clyde, which has had a long tradition of shipbuilding, and we know that victims of asbestos-related illnesses are still being identified. Does he agree that perhaps the insurance industry is looking ahead and estimating that what we had hoped would be the peak in the number of these victims is not the peak? In fact, still to this day, GPs on the Clyde actively ask people who go to see them with chest complaints, “Where did you work? Did you work near asbestos?” Is not that why the insurance companies are so reluctant?

[Jim Sheridan]

My hon. Friend and neighbour is absolutely right. He, like me and many people who worked in the industrial sector, whether it be in the shipyards, in the mines or wherever, live with the constant fear that a cough could develop into something more worrying like mesothelioma. In the industrial sector, regardless of the part of the country we come from, that is something we have to live with on a daily basis.