Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

It is 43 years since I started work as a coal miner, and during the many years for which I was a union rep I saw some horrendous accidents: men who had their legs cut off by broken ropes or broken chains; a man buried alive under thousands of tonnes of coal; a man impaled on the roof of a coal mine by a machine; and a man whose pelvis was broken by another machine. I represented people with stress-related illnesses. I represented thousands of people in my 35 years as a trade union representative and I sat on social security tribunals, went to social security tribunals and sat on industrial tribunals, but nothing could convince me that anything is more pernicious than the situation for people who are suffering from mesothelioma. Mesothelioma is an exceptional case, because of what the disease does. When I first became aware of mesothelioma, I asked a solicitor, Ian McFall from Thompsons Solicitors in Newcastle, to explain to me exactly what it was. He said that one fibre could go into someone's lung and lie dormant for many years, but when it becomes active there is no alternative—that person suffers horribly and then they die. There is no cure, no remission and no element of survival; they die, and that makes it a special case. Everybody who gets mesothelioma will die an agonising death. The real real reason why mesothelioma is an exceptional case is that the problem was known about for more than a century. Asbestos was identified as a poisonous substance in 1892 and has been banned for use in this country for almost half a century, yet employers knowingly exposed their workers to it day in, day out. They knew the dangers and ignored them for decades. They were eventually held accountable, but ever since the first successful case against the employers and their insurers on asbestos-related diseases, the employers and the insurers have kept coming back to the courts and to this place. The hon. Member for Broxtowe (Anna Soubry) asked why we in this place were involved in this issue, but we constantly have to rewrite the law because people are using the law and this place to get away from their responsibilities. The decision on pleural plaques a few years ago was welcomed by KPMG because, as it said, that was a £1.4 billion handout to the insurance industry in this country. Those were the people who were clapping their hands on that day, not those who have asbestos-related diseases.