Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

Lilian Greenwood Excerpts

Tuesday 17th April 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr David Anderson (Blaydon) (Lab)]

It is 43 years since I started work as a coal miner, and during the many years for which I was a union rep I saw some horrendous accidents: men who had their legs cut off by broken ropes or broken chains; a man buried alive under thousands of tonnes of coal; a man impaled on the roof of a coal mine by a machine; and a man whose pelvis was broken by another machine. I represented people with stress-related illnesses. I represented thousands of people in my 35 years as a trade union representative and I sat on social security tribunals, went to social security tribunals and sat on industrial tribunals, but nothing could convince me that anything is more pernicious than the situation for people who are suffering from mesothelioma.

Mesothelioma is an exceptional case, because of what the disease does. When I first became aware of mesothelioma, I asked a solicitor, Ian McFall from Thompsons Solicitors in Newcastle, to explain to me exactly what it was. He said that one fibre could go into someone’s lung and lie dormant for many years, but when it becomes active there is no alternative—that person suffers horribly and then they die. There is no cure, no remission and no element of survival; they die, and that makes it a special case. Everybody who gets mesothelioma will die an agonising death.

The real real reason why mesothelioma is an exceptional case is that the problem was known about for more than a century. Asbestos was identified as a poisonous substance in 1892 and has been banned for use in this country for almost half a century, yet employers knowingly exposed their workers to it day in, day out. They knew the dangers and ignored them for decades. They were eventually held accountable, but ever since the first successful case against the employers and their insurers on asbestos-related diseases, the employers and the insurers have kept coming back to the courts and to this place.

The hon. Member for Broxtowe (Anna Soubry) asked why we in this place were involved in this issue, but we constantly have to rewrite the law because people are using the law and this place to get away from their responsibilities. The decision on pleural plaques a few years ago was welcomed by KPMG because, as it said, that was a £1.4 billion handout to the insurance industry in this country. Those were the people who were clapping their hands on that day, not those who have asbestos-related diseases.

[Lilian Greenwood (Nottingham South) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that that is why the constituents whom we have been speaking to feel so angry? They cannot understand why the Government are on the side of negligent employers and their insurance companies instead of on the side of mesothelioma victims.

[Mr Anderson]

What can I say? Someone said earlier that no empathy is being shown, but I think that empathy is being shown—to the insurance companies. We can take our guidance from that.

The Minister talked about the compensation culture, but it is very easy to stop that culture: tell employers to stop killing people at work and to stop poisoning people at work. Then people would not be able to claim compensation. That is exactly what needs to be done. We are talking about employers who have contempt for workers and their families. They let workmen go home in dirty work clothes that their wives then washed, and became infected with mesothelioma through doing so. What happened was known by employers. We are talking about employers who were using young kids in Namibia to fill plastic sacks with raw asbestos. They put young kids of seven, eight or nine in the sacks to tamp the asbestos down. That is the type of people we are dealing with—people with no regard for human life. Some successful cases were brought by a trade union in South Africa and they got £38 million in compensation. That £38 million was welcome but it did not save the lives of any of those kids.

We have had 42,000 people die in the past 40 years in this country and 60,000 more will die in the next 50. That is more than 1,000 people a year and more than were being killed in the coal mines in this country in the disastrous years of the 1930s. That is why this is a special issue. We should be looking to people such as Chris Knighton in the north-east of England who has led a campaign on behalf of her husband who died 15 years ago—a man who was fit enough to ride from Newcastle to Berwick on a bike on a Sunday morning and think nothing about it. He fell down one day in the local club and when he went to see the doctor, the doctor told him, “You’ve got mesothelioma.” He asked, “What does that mean?” The doctor said, “It means you’re going to be dead in nine months’ time.” Those are the people we are standing up for today. We are not standing up for big business or insurers—we are standing up for ordinary people who have been exploited for years. If we do not support the amendments to this legislation we will be letting those people down. I say to the Liberal Democrats in particular, “If you ever want to claw back from where you are now, support these amendments tonight. You will never be forgiven if you don’t.”