Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

My Lords, I support the amendment and the noble Lords who spoke. My thoughts turn to a lawyer, the late Frank Maguire, who died recently. He was a campaigning lawyer on behalf of asbestos sufferers north of the border. He took on very difficult cases. Many of them were test cases. The important thing for his clients was that he offered a no-win no-fee arrangement. We may be perhaps comfortable in our lives, but it should be remembered that a disease of the lungs creeps up on a person. They feel breathless gradually. They might put it down to smoking or something else around them. Also, because of their shortness of breath, they lose time at work if they are lucky to be employed, so they are not very well off financially by the time they go to see a solicitor. When they see the solicitor, it is a great relief to have a no-win no-fee arrangement. I was in a room with a constituent who was being questioned by the late Frank Maguire. Frank would go back to a time when they were 15 or sometimes 14. Like a police officer, he would ask about every place of employment where the person had worked. The person suffering from the disease and difficulty had to recall all the places they had worked because—let us face it—an employer is going to deny liability and a lawyer has to ensure that the right person or company is being claimed against. That is not easy with all the closures that have taken place over the past 50 years. Many companies have closed down and others have changed their name. Some companies that have stayed in business have changed their address, so it is hard for a lawyer to track them down. It would be a great help if the Minister would say that in this instance the Government will make sure that they do not create any more difficulties not only for sufferers but for their families. I did not set out to be an asbestos worker, but these things happen when you go into a factory. As an apprentice metal worker I was expected to drill metal; I made electric heaters. As in the case of the toasters that the noble Lord mentioned, the elements of the electric heaters were wrapped around light asbestos board. When I was 16, my boss used to instruct me to cut and drill the asbestos. There were many young women in the factory who drilled the asbestos. In fact, because it was white board instead of metal that was covered in oil that got on your denims, you quite liked this white powder that you could just wipe off, not realising the dangers involved. The relatives come into this because in those days, you did not send your clothes off to the laundry, mum did the washing. In some cases, there could be two or three daughters in one family working with that asbestos and going home. Their mum was exposed to the asbestos. Then if mum was ever feeling breathless, a good doctor—there are many good doctors around—would probably ask a man where he worked before he retired and if he said he worked in the shipyard there might be a possibility that he was using asbestos that was the cause of the breathlessness, but for a mother, a housewife, it might not dawn on the doctor that she had any contact with asbestos. That makes it all the harder for the lawyer to fight the case when it finally comes. I am proud of the fact that a company in my constituency went from asbestos board to non-asbestos board. It did a lot of research because it knew the dangers. The boards were used for fire prevention in buildings. It decided to get the non-asbestos board which would not be harmful to workers, but at the time that it was producing that board, in Poland, the shipyards in Gdansk were receiving orders from that company and from other parts of the United Kingdom where asbestos board was going from here to Poland. The Polish workers—that was before Lech Walesa became the president—were having to work with asbestos boards in those shipyards. The reason I mention that point is that it might be the case that some of those old ships would come into repair yards in the United Kingdom, and it is not until they start to do repairs that the workers discover that they are being exposed to asbestos. In fact, even in this building, where the heating system is very old—in fact, I would say this evening that it is non-existent—if any repair has to be done in the basements, it would probably be the case that they would come across asbestos substances. The point I am trying to make is that some people know that they are going to work with asbestos. Other people, when they go out to a day’s work, do not know that they are going to work with asbestos, but before the day is out, that is what is going to happen.