Asbestos in Workplaces

Mick Whitley Excerpts

Wednesday 19th April 2023 Westminster Hall

[Mick Whitley (Birkenhead) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Loughborough (Jane Hunt) on securing this important debate. It is particularly timely for those constituents of mine who were forced to take strike action in February when their employer, a local social housing provider, was accused of forcing them to handle asbestos in tenants’ homes, a job that they were not properly trained for. Thankfully, that strike was successful, but at a cost of significant disruption to the tenants and, of course, great anxiety for those workers, who feared being exposed to such a lethal substance. I raise it today as a reminder that asbestos is not a historical tragedy. We continue to live with asbestos today, and it is vital that employers in high-risk sectors are reminded of the duties they have to keep their staff safe.

I was an active trade unionist when we first began to reckon with the dangers of asbestos. Experts warned of the dangers for decades, but it was only in the 1970s, when confronted with rising rates of mesothelioma across the UK, that the construction industry was forced to acknowledge the devastation that asbestos can wreak. Even then, it was not until 1999 that we finally achieved a total prohibition on its use, more than 15 years after the first law banning some forms of asbestos had been introduced. I am not sure that it will ever be possible to calculate the number of people who were exposed to asbestos in buildings that were built or refurbished in that 15-year window alone, but we can say with some confidence that lives could doubtless have been saved if we had acted far sooner.

So we are gathered here today to confront a deadly legacy. Asbestos can be found everywhere in our lives—in the environment, our schools, our homes and our office buildings. Indeed, the Labour Research Department found that there were 451 premises in London alone with asbestos and that two thirds of NHS premises and buildings that were considered still contain asbestos today.

According to the Health and Safety Executive, asbestos remains the largest killer in the workplace and its enduring prevalence means that, tragically, there are healthy people alive today who will die from asbestos-related diseases, including mesothelioma, of which the UK has the highest number of cases in the world.

As a former regional secretary of Unite the union, I have represented thousands of workers in construction, which is the industry with the highest asbestos-related mortality rates. I have seen at first hand the terrible suffering that these vicious diseases inflict, and I know just how important it is that we deliver a strategy to rid our country of this ticking time bomb as soon as we possibly can.

I want to express my gratitude to charities such as Mesothelioma UK, as well as the Merseyside Asbestos Victim Support Group, for everything they have done to bring this issue to broader attention.

Any objective assessment of the progress made in the more than two decades since asbestos was banned for good, and in particular over the last 13 years of Tory Government, cannot but lead to the conclusion that that progress has been woefully inadequate. The families of those who have lost their lives to mesothelioma and other asbestos-related diseases are angry. They have just cause to be angry, and so do those whose loved ones will lose their lives in the future.

The Work and Pensions Committee’s recent report revealed that there is no clear strategy on how to realise the vision of an asbestos-free Britain and that there is a lack of meaningful investment and research into the removal of asbestos. It called for a pan-Government and system-wide strategy and for a legally binding 40-year commitment to the removal of asbestos from all non-domestic buildings. That is the kind of clarity and certainty that the victims of asbestos rightly deserve.