Mesothelioma (Amendment) Bill [HL]

Lord Avebury Excerpts

Friday 20th November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Avebury (LD)]

My Lords, I, too, begin by congratulating my friend, the noble Lord, Lord Alton, on his masterly presentation of the case for the Bill, and on the assiduity with which he has pursued compensation for mesothelioma sufferers over a great many years with determination and thoroughness. I know how many hours he has spent on this and how many more hours he is likely to spend on it in future, but if we get this Bill through, it will be a major advance in securing compensation for sufferers of this horrible disease.

I started work on mesothelioma 40 years ago with the late Nancy Tait, whose husband died an agonising death from mesothelioma. She formed the Society for the Prevention of Asbestosis and Industrial Diseases, which lobbied hard for tighter controls on asbestos, and she fought for the rights of victims to adequate compensation. We published a pamphlet entitled Asbestos Kills, but the use of the material continued here in the UK long after it was banned in other countries of the developed world. That explains why the UK was the country with the highest age-adjusted death rate from 1994 to 2008, with 17.8 deaths per million. The Health and Safety Executive expects the death rate to peak in 2018, after which it will slowly decline, but because there can be a delay of several decades between exposure to asbestos and the onset of mesothelioma, the disease may well be claiming hundreds of lives a year in the decade 2050-60. To put it another way, over the next 30 years, 30,000 deaths are expected from this horrible disease unless new and effective treatments are developed.

At the moment, there is no cure for mesothelioma, and funding for research is woefully inadequate and uncertain. There are said to be government grants of £1.2 million a year, and last January the insurance companies Aviva and Zurich announced one-off funding of another £1 million, but there is no continuity, no assurance that in the years to come there will be even the same level of funding as there is in 2015, with the obvious result that cancer researchers starting out on a career will look for projects in other areas. That may explain the paucity of really high-quality applications coming forward.

Cancer Research UK says it is looking to invest more in rarer cancers, and it would be useful if the Minister could say what has emerged so far from the strategy published in May last year. However, as the noble Lord, Lord Alton, reminded us, in 2014 a mere £860,000 was spent on mesothelioma research—a miserable amount compared, say, with the £9.9 million spent on skin cancer or the £5.5 million spent on melanoma, which are cancers with similar mortality.

The noble Lord, Lord Alton, has been tireless in his attempts to put this right over the years, and I warmly support his latest efforts in this Bill. In addition to the amounts active insurers are required to pay to fund the diffuse mesothelioma compensation scheme, he proposes, as he did in the summer of 2013, that the levy be increased by an amount not exceeding 1% of the compensation payments to fund mesothelioma research. This is supported by the British Lung Foundation, which points out that by improving outcomes and thereby reducing compensation payouts, insurers would stand to benefit from the research. The BLF tells me that the insurance industry is expecting to pay out more than £12 billion under the existing scheme over the years. A fraction of this enormous amount invested in high-quality research could revolutionise our understanding of mesothelioma and lead to significant improvements in the treatment and management of the condition.

Your Lordships may recall that when we last debated this matter in 2013 there was widespread support for the basic principle of insurer-funded research, and of course we are extremely grateful to the two companies that contributed voluntarily to start the process. However, as the noble Lord, Lord Alton, reminded us, there are another 148 insurers active in the employers’ liability market that would contribute if this Bill were passed. Zurich announced a few weeks ago that it was walking away from its £5.6 billion bid for UK insurer RSA. The amounts active insurers would be asked to pay under this Bill are insignificant in comparison with their assets, but they could transform the outlook for mesothelioma patients and their families.