Mesothelioma Bill [HL]

Lord Moonie Excerpts

Wednesday 5th June 2013 Grand Committee

[Baroness Golding]

My Lords, I have been discussing this Bill with a number of people in my former constituency. I was told by a former employer that, 10 years ago, his firm was employed to do some work in the boiler house of a prison. He was told that there was no asbestos on the site and the men started work. On visiting the site himself, he was not convinced that this was correct, so he got samples and paid for a scientific analysis of the work on the site. The site was dangerous and contained asbestos. The Health and Safety Executive was called in and immediately closed down the site. The employer was told that he could not prosecute the Crown but that he may be able to prosecute the governor of the prison. Needless to say, he did not bother to do that. He did, however, keep a file of all the details of what had happened in the firm’s papers. He sold the firm on, and it has been sold again since. I hope that the papers are still there. What will happen in a case like that, where the liable employer was the Crown, which the contracted employer was told could not be sued? The contracting employer was not to blame but the Crown certainly was. Will this section of the Bill cover this?

[Lord Moonie]

I am sure that the Minister will be grateful to know that I shall be brief. Unlike the many lawyers that I see round about, my background is in medicine. I trained in the 1960s, and I further trained in epidemiology in the early 1980s. I had friends who died from this disease.

I want to make a very brief point. The first formal recognition of this disease in Britain came in 1932, when the first regulations were introduced. Since then, it has been very clearly established that this is an occupational disease—that it is virtually impossible to acquire the disease other than in a situation where the fibres are present. Therefore I am speaking specifically in support of the wives and families who may have been affected. There must surely be a case for accepting, after 80 years, that the bringing home of clothes with asbestos fibres upon them was a negligence on the part of the employer.

[Lord Empey]

My Lords, like many Members, I have the honour to have represented a shipyards constituency for over 25 years. I have seen this disease at relatively close quarters over that time.

There is one category of person that we have not yet mentioned in discussing these amendments. We have discussed people who perhaps washed clothes, but we have not discussed the children. When I was Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Investment in Belfast 11 years ago, we set aside £180 million, if my memory serves me correctly. I saw a graph which showed that we had put money aside up to 2050 to take care of the victims that we anticipated would still be emerging because they were young children when the material was imported into their homes.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Kakkar]

My Lords, the national research effort has been a great success in our country because it is strategic and, as the Minister has said, rightly targets areas to drive excellence and research. However, there are very good examples of collaborative research efforts between industry and Her Majesty’s Government in certain targeted areas to ensure that the volume of funds is available to address specific research questions. Would it not be possible for the Department of Health to consider, as a result of the discussions in this Committee and the passage of this Bill, whether there should be a move towards a strategic research effort in the area of mesothelioma? This could go through the normal processes identified within the Department of Health, the National Institute for Health Research, the Medical Research Council, and the Office for Strategic Coordination of Health Research in the Cabinet Office. Having gone through those normal processes, funds could then be generated through this particular levy. Funds defined and voted on through the national research funds available in the Department of Health could then be combined in a strategic way and focused on institutions that were prepared to make a commitment in this area.

[Lord Moonie]

Perhaps I may add a small point from my own field in medicine. One of the problems with mesothelioma is that it is diagnosed so late that it is generally considered a hopeless condition. That was certainly the case with friends of mine who died of it some years ago. Gradually things are beginning to look a little brighter. It is important to get treatment early. We know largely who the potential case bodies are likely to comprise—those who have historically been exposed to asbestos—and the numbers should not really be added to at this stage. Therefore it ought to be possible to devise research, either through markers or through surveillance of the case load, to establish diagnosis of mesothelioma earlier and provide more hope to the patients who suffer from it. That might be a fruitful argument for the Minister to make to his colleagues in the Department of Health.

[Lord Freud]

I take from this a weight of feeling and, bluntly, the best thing that I can do is to take it back in to Government; my department is almost not relevant in this area. In a sense, I do not think that that is the issue. The irony is that those in the insurance industry are the only ones who have been paying anything of any substance in this area. This is, if you like, directed at the wrong area. As the noble Lord, Lord Kakkar, said, why is this not of some strategic importance?

My feedback from the Department of Health and Sally Davies is that they are aware that it is odd that so little is spent on this disease. However, I think that that is where the problem lies and that it is a kind of chicken-and-egg situation. In a way, the insurance industry is in the position of the gambling industry, which has a voluntary scheme and has been spending money voluntarily. It does not need this pressure. What we need to worry about is: how much, as a country, are we spending on this disease?

I hope that noble Lords can hear that I am enormously sympathetic to what lies behind the amendment, and I am not only sympathetic because I have had a hard time this afternoon; I have been spending six months of the year running around on this issue, a bit like a mad mouse in a wheel, trying to find a way through.

This debate has been valuable. The next stage is to have a major event—my noble friend Lord Howe and I even have a date in the diary—where we start to do something about this and get something going. That is really what we are looking for, rather than something more mechanistic, such as what is proposed here, which I cannot do.