Compensation Bill [Lords]

Those are my thoughts precisely, Mr. Deputy Speaker. However, I would like to say a little about where the unions stand on the issue. Most unions do not behave in the reprehensible way described so effectively in that report. In most unions there is a rule-book relationship between the union member and the union as an institution. Legal assistance is available when members want it, not specifically when members have just joined the union. According to the Trades Union Congress, some 64,000 new personal injury cases were taken up on behalf of their members last year by TUC affiliates. It is important for us to do nothing to impinge on that relationship, and the enormous strengths that would not be there if there was a different structure. I know from my experience before I came to the House that trade unions can proceed with cases in difficult areas that become test cases, or vanguard cases. No individual solicitor acting for an individual claimant would have the resources to take on such ground-breaking cases. I have been involved in settlements relating to industrial deafness and vibration white finger. There have been advances that are largely due to individual unions taking up test cases and funding class actions. I was a young official at the GMB when John Edmonds was the national industrial officer for the electricity industry. He went on to become general secretary of the GMB. We made an agreement with the nuclear industry to try to secure compensation for victims of radiation in the industry, given the possibility of their developing leukaemia. That agreement, gained partly through the law and partly through negotiation, has not yet been superseded in the courts. It has stood the test of time for 30 years. That illustrates the value to working people in difficult, even terrible, circumstances of membership of a trade union that can handle the law astutely and well, and has the financial resources to bring an action much too big for any individual claimant to afford. On the back of successes in the courts, the union was able to use its industrial muscle to negotiate a good, enduring agreement with the employers for people who did not deserve to be victims of the industrial injuries that they had suffered. That brings me to mesothelioma, which, as most Members will know, is a horrible condition. There is no known cure, although there are palliatives. Alimta, a new drug, helps in some cases, but provides only remission. It does not reverse the condition, although it provides some comfort. Dying of mesothelioma is a horrible way to die, made all the more horrible when people see the sufferings of their loved ones as they go. I believe that we as a Parliament should stand in the victims’ corner, but in any event we should be able to vote on how cases are handled in the courts. It is a question of whether it is possible to join all the potential employers to the action and have the damages assigned proportionately, which used to be the arrangement, or whether it is necessary to identify the specific employer who caused the injury, which is what the new judgment means. It represents a substantial setback for a number of such cases. The condition takes time to develop. We are talking about working conditions that prevailed in the past, notably in heavy industries such as mining, shipbuilding, heavy engineering, the railways and the merchant marine service. The condition might develop in any area where asbestos was used, perhaps sprayed, as a fire retardant, or a construction material. Those cases are emerging now, and there is nothing that we can do to stop the process. The hon. Member for North-East Hertfordshire was right to say that the number of cases would peak quite some way into the future. Working practices in industry in those days meant that people would go to one job and carry out a task, and might then perform a similar task on a different project, perhaps for a different employer. It is difficult to identify the employer for whom a person was working at the precise point when he inhaled a specific fibre—not one that was too big to inhale, and not one that was so small that it was exhaled, but one that was just the right size to lodge in the lung and cause pleural plaque and eventually mesothelioma.