It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Totnes (Dr Wollaston), who speaks knowledgeably and movingly from her own experience, making some extremely telling points.
I, too, welcome this Bill as a step in the right direction but, as has been said many times, it needs to be strengthened, particularly in respect of the level of compensation. I pay tribute to the work done in the other place on this Bill by Lord Wigley. As I have said, he worked tirelessly for many years to get the Pneumoconiosis etc (Workers’ Compensation) Act 1979 on to the statute book.
I have a special constituency reason to be interested in the Bill, because I represent a former slate quarrying area that has benefited from the provisions of the 1979 Act; it provided compensation to slate workers whose former employers had gone out of business and could not therefore be sued. My area also, at one time, had a Ferodo/Turner and Newall factory, which used asbestos for many years from the 1960s onwards. Recently, I have heard dreadful tales from former employees of workers
in the 1960s having snowball fights with fistfuls of asbestos during tea breaks and at lunch time. I was also told that the factory was a dust trap from one end to the other and that it was rarely cleaned properly. Some hon. Members will know that the factory later morphed into the infamous Friction Dynamics concern, which provoked and then lost the longest-running industrial dispute of recent times. The owners lost and then evaded their responsibilities—it is a lesson to us all—and the wrongly sacked workers still have not received a single penny piece in compensation for wrongful dismissal. Some of those people are also suffering from the effects of asbestos.
The incidence of mesothelioma in my constituency is much lower than elsewhere; Gwynedd is a rural area, and therein lies the clue. Mesothelioma is less prevalent there, but among the particular group of workers I mention it is as prevalent as elsewhere. The effects on the individual are, of course, as bad as anywhere else, whatever the incidence in the general population. We know that it can take many years for symptoms of this awful disease to be manifest, and people in seemingly unconnected industries and occupations can be sufferers. They include a former constituent of mine who had never worked near an asbestos plant but had worked as a boiler maker on submarines, and someone who had many years before been a sub-contractor removing asbestos from redundant buildings before fully realising the danger to which he was exposed.
As we have heard, mesothelioma strikes people in later life and, for me, the case for compensation could not be clearer. Many people may have lost out on compensation because of the delay between 2010 and this scheme being announced in 2012. As I said, however, my main concern, and the main concern that has been conveyed to me, is about the level of compensation. Sufferers face 100% of the effects of this dreadful disease, so how can it be right that they are offered a lesser degree of compensation? In the other place, Lord Wigley tabled an amendment that would have brought the level up to 80%. As other hon. Members have noted, Lord Freud said that it was impossible to get the insurers to agree. I made the point in an earlier intervention that the 1979 Act provides for 100% of the compensation available before the courts, and of course recovery of already paid benefits will be at 100%.
I am glad that progress has been made, but the Bill is narrower in scope than some of us would like. It offers recourse to those suffering from diffuse mesothelioma only—and to eligible dependants—and it is available only to those diagnosed on or after 25 July 2012. The Bill makes provision for a scheme that will make payments to those persons, provided that they have brought no action against an employer or the employer’s liability insurer because they were unable to do so. Surely that date should be at least three years earlier, in line with the three-year limitation period in law.
I draw the Minister’s attention to the fact that conditions excluded from the provisions—presumably because of the difficulty in proving causation—have already been included in an administrative scheme that pays compensation to all asbestos victims at Turner and Newall asbestos factories. If that company can do it, why cannot the Government do it?
It seems unfair, cruel and inhuman to impose—as insurance industry insiders have suggested—a lower rate to encourage people to persevere in identifying
insurers so that claims will be brought to the scheme only once all other avenues have been exhausted. People will be experiencing the distressing and incapacitating symptoms at a time when they are likely to be seeking compensation and will often not be in any condition to pursue extensive research, not least because of their very short life expectancy. That is the grim reality.
Finally, I echo the points made by other hon. Members in respect of the research that is so desperately needed. As has already been said, the UK has the highest rate of mesothelioma in the world, and the small amount of money invested in research compares very badly with the research into other cancers. New funding for research over the past three years has produced good results. I have read about new researchers and new expertise, but long-term funding must be secured for this important research.
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