Mesothelioma Bill [HL]

Lord Giddens Excerpts

Monday 20th May 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Giddens]

My Lords, I should like to begin by expressing my heartfelt sympathy to anyone who has, as I have, lost a loved one to this horrendous disease. It is essentially a death sentence for anyone who contracts it. I would like to correct my noble friend Lady Taylor, who is not in her place. It is not always contracted in the workplace. You can contract the disease in other contexts too, and that is true of the person in my family. It is important to say that. It is relevant in this debate not just to concentrate on this country but to look around the world at the eccentric, problematic and tortured history of this disease and the response to it of the legal system and the building and insurance industries. There is a lot to learn here that is relevant to our debate.

Asbestos was originally called a “magic dust” and it was used extensively with that in mind in all sorts of installations around the world, where, of course, it still remains. There is still an enormous amount of asbestos in many buildings in very many countries across the world, especially developing countries, where it is still in a lethal state. There is a very interesting book on this and—my noble friend just referred to this—on the resistance of industry and government to accepting liability. It is by Geoffrey Tweedale and has the appropriate title Magic Mineral to Killer Dust. That is what it is today. As noble Lords have said, it can take 20 to 50 years to appear, and in that sense tracks to some degree the history of tobacco, the diseases from which also take a long time to come out and took a long time to identify. It just makes me wonder what other lethal diseases might be lurking out there in the world, a point I will come back to later on, because we now eat so many foods with additives that no one has ever experienced before and we ingest all sorts of substances from the air that have never existed before because they are new forms of synthetic materials. It just makes me wonder what lies in store elsewhere if diseases like this take such a long time to come out and therefore to identify.

It is difficult to establish the aetiology of diseases that come to light after many years. Tracking the history of mesothelioma is really intriguing in this respect because there was enormous resistance at first to identifying it as a single syndrome or disease, and secondly to identifying its causation. Again, this tracked the tobacco industry. The disease was known in some sense since just after the turn of the century, but it was not until the 1960s that a vital set of researches was published in South Africa that changed the consciousness of the medical profession, and then, quite a long while after that, the other authorities involved.

As often with these sorts of things, publicity was gained for mesothelioma by the fact that the film actor Steve McQueen died of it. He worked with racing cars and he apparently ingested asbestos from their brake linings. That brought it to the public consciousness in America, but it is important to stress that there was very strong resistance from the building industry, from the asbestos industry and particularly from the insurance industry in most countries. They just picked apart the research in much the same way in which the tobacco industry tried to pick apart the research on lung cancer. Hence, in all countries, it was a long time before either business or Governments accepted any liability at all. In most countries, there was an endless turmoil of lawsuits, which meant that most people who brought the cases got no benefit from them at all, and neither, often, did their dependants. I am sure noble Lords know that in America there was a complete bottleneck of such cases. That is in nobody’s interest. It is partly for that reason that I join other noble Lords in welcoming this legislation and congratulate the noble Lord on his part in it.

However, I worry a lot about the cut-off date. It is clear that the scheme must have some kind of limitation, but I just worry that it is a recipe for bitterness because it has a wholly arbitrary element to it. I have seen someone at close hand dying of this disease. If you also consider that the cut-off date is 25 July 2012, it is clear that it is purely a date on which the Government responded to their consultation. It is an administrative date; it bears no relation to suffering, and there is terrible suffering from this disease.

I join other noble Lords in suggesting that, at least at some point, a further exploration with the insurance industry is surely warranted. Mesothelioma is not like the whiplash industry: there is no element whatever of moral hazard in it. However, we know that there are large areas like that in the insurance industry with lots of problematic claims. You could argue that mesothelioma sufferers are paying for this grey area of the insurance industry with this arbitrary cut-off. I hope the Minister will give some attention to the impact that that might have on a family before simply going ahead with it in other parts of the discussion of this Bill. If the Minister has not read it, I recommend reading Geoffrey Tweedale’s book. It is a salutary tale of resistance to regulation and the devious practices that can be involved in it.

In conclusion, I have two questions for the Minister. First, will the Government at least give some attention to the moral and psychological impact of a cut-off date of this sort? Could they see whether there is any way in which it could be neutered for the sufferer? As I said, it bears no real relation to the awful depth of suffering, not just for the person but for the dependants of that person. Secondly, will the Minister consider working proactively with the insurance industry to scan similar problems in advance? This is where I come back to the point I made at the beginning: that there might be lots of potentially lethal diseases stored up in our environment, so it would seem sensible to try to develop a kind of proactive response to this. I do not know whether the Minister has any scheme in mind or whether the insurance industry, the Government and medical research could work together. We do not really want this sad and sorry tale repeated elsewhere, because next time it could have even more devastating consequences.