Many Members welcome the Bill. I welcome that a move has finally been made on compensation for mesothelioma victims, but I do not welcome the Bill in its present form. Irwin Mitchell, a firm of solicitors in Newcastle that deals with compensation cases, described this as “a second-rate Bill.” I totally agree. A lot has been said tonight on the history of mesothelioma claims. My hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green), speaking from the Opposition Front Bench, was clear that all the major changes on asbestos-related legislation have been made under Labour Administrations.
The hon. Member for Chatham and Aylesford (Tracey Crouch) is not in her place. She spoke well in summing up some of the issues. She admitted that she was a poacher turned gamekeeper, but her points were well
made. She talked about serving on the Public Bill Committee—I am not sure whether the Whips will allow her to be a member of the Committee after that speech. She mentioned the figure of 80% and I will come back to that later on in my contribution. I take the view that in negotiations one should never declare one’s final figure at the beginning. If she is aiming for 80%, she should have started negotiating for a much higher figure. The current figure is totally unacceptable. I pay tribute to Lord McKenzie of Luton for his work when he was Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Department for Work and Pensions under the previous Government, and for his work in the other place in trying to amend the Bill.
The tragedy—it is a tragedy—is that asbestos-related deaths have been known for many years, but they have been ignored. It is a cruel and painful death. I saw many cases when I was legal officer for the GMB northern region and no amount of money can compensate for suffering a long lingering death, literally gasping for air at the end, or for the pain that families go through while watching their loved ones die. My hon. Friend the Member for Hartlepool (Mr Wright) mentioned a number of cases relating to traditional industries in his constituency. One tragic case I had to deal with concerned a 44-year-old lagger—I think the proper title is thermal insulation engineer—who used to lag pipes in the shipbuilding and offshore industries. This chap, who was 43, had a wife and three young children, so it was terrible to be told that he was suffering from mesothelioma. The most tragic aspect of this case was mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough (Andy McDonald) —that it was a death sentence. This man had to face the fact that he would not live to see his children grow up or to continue the close relationship he had with his family and extended family within Hartlepool. This man was 43, but I have also dealt with cases of people who were a lot older.
Much reference has been made to the fact that the disease might take 30 or 40 years to develop, but in my experience it is quite arbitrary whether the disease develops following exposure to asbestos. I remember speaking to some old boilermakers—I am sure my hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough will have done so, too, in his previous life before coming here—who described dealing with asbestos as “lagging it on” and “blowing it on”. They would walk into double bottoms in ships and be surrounded by airborne asbestos, yet some of them have not developed a long-term, asbestos-related condition. I have also seen some very old gentlemen with asbestos still scarring their hands. The arbitrary nature of the disease makes it very difficult to predict who will ultimately develop mesothelioma or other asbestos-related cancers and conditions.
When I was elected in 2001, I shared an office for my first six months with my hon. Friend the Member for Midlothian (Mr Hamilton) and John MacDougall, the former Member for Glenrothes. Some colleagues may remember John—a larger than life character, a dedicated constituency MP and a former council leader. It was tragic that his career in this House was cut short by mesothelioma in 2008. John’s attitude was very positive. He knew, deep down, that he was dying, but he came back to this Chamber, even after quite aggressive surgery on one of his lungs, and maintained the cheerful and positive manner for which we all knew him. Unfortunately,
he did succumb to that disease, showing that it can affect people like him who worked in the shipbuilding industry many years ago.
Much of our attention has quite rightly been focused on heavy industry, but this disease does not just affect people working in heavy industries. There are well-documented cases of people who have had very limited exposure to asbestos in hospitals or other public buildings, yet have gone on to develop mesothelioma. Again, that shows the arbitrary nature of this disease.
Personally, I think there are a lot of scare stories about asbestos. Some of the press could be labelled “asbestos deniers”, but asbestos is a safe product as long as it is not disturbed. As was said earlier, we need to educate people about how to use asbestos and how to react to it. As a minimum, asbestos should be marked on any public building. If it is not disturbed, it is not dangerous, but we must ensure that when it is removed, it is done professionally by people who know what they are doing. That should help to prevent any further damaging exposure, which is important for the future.
As I said earlier, the tragedy of this and other asbestos-related conditions is that the danger has been known for many years. Even the ancient Greeks and Romans worked out that if people worked for a while with asbestos, they developed a disease and died. Moving on to the 1930s, there was the Meriwether report, in which the term mesothelioma was first used. We have thus known from the 1930s that the condition was related to asbestos.
I know that the date of knowledge is 1965 for the purposes of the courts, but earlier cases have been documented. The Government wrote to the Confederation of Shipbuilders after the second world war, congratulating it on the work that it had done during the conflict but warning about the dangers of exposure to asbestos. However, nothing was done to protect people from those dangers. Our failure to take the warning more seriously and react to it at the time is a national scandal, and a dark stain on the nation’s history. As my hon. Friend the Member for Jarrow (Mr Hepburn) said earlier, if this had been happening in a leafy suburb, Governments would have paid attention to it more quickly, but those affected were mainly poor working-class communities in areas such as the north-east.
I pay tribute to the campaigning work of the asbestos awareness groups, which have been tenacious in ensuring that the issue has remained in the public eye. They should be given credit for the fact that the Bill has at least reached its starting point. I am not afraid to say that I think we should also congratulate the trade unions on the work that they have done for many years in raising awareness. [Interruption.] The Secretary of State accused me of chuntering earlier, but he is chuntering now. That is obviously because the modern Conservative party considers trade unions to be universally bad. However, the test cases and the education about asbestos that followed them would not have been possible without the trade unions who championed those cases, and they ought to be thanked for that.
I also pay tribute to Ian McFall of Thompsons in Newcastle, who was mentioned earlier by my hon. Friend the Member for Blaydon (Mr Anderson). I worked with him closely when I was the GMB’s legal officer, and he was very tenacious in his efforts to ensure that cases were heard and compensation was secured
for people. A difficulty that used to confront me every week was caused by the fact that, in the case of many older men, it was not known that they had contracted mesothelioma until they died. It is awful to have to say to a family “There must be an autopsy to establish what this person has died of.” I remember one alarming occasion when someone rang two days before a funeral was due to take place, and Ian and I had to stop the funeral to ensure that there was an autopsy so that the evidence could be used. Ian has great expertise when it comes to compiling the history of where people worked and trying to trace the insurance companies. It is time-consuming, laborious work, but it can be done.
It is important for anyone who has worked with asbestos to make a record of where they worked with it. I pay tribute to those in GMB Northern Region who, along with their solicitors, set up an asbestos register on which people were asked to log that information. They might not have developed the disease yet, but if they developed it later, at least it would be possible to establish where they had worked. It was not uncommon for people to move around different shipyards on both Teesside and Tyneside, and before nationalisation it was sometimes very difficult to establish who their actual employer was. Another industry that proved notoriously difficult in that regard from the late 1980s onwards was the building industry, in which people moved from site to site—usually on a very casual basis—and were exposed to asbestos throughout their working lives. Trying to put together some of those long employment histories was very difficult. That is why I recommend that anyone who has worked with asbestos make sure that loved ones or solicitors know where they worked, because this disease can develop later on and that is vital information in order to be able to trace the employers and the insurers and companies involved.
My hon. Friend the Member for Hartlepool raised the issue of the north-east, as did my hon. Friend the Member for Wansbeck (Ian Lavery). The north-east has nearly 10% of England’s mesothelioma cases. That will not come as a surprise to anyone who knows anything about asbestos-related diseases, because of the north-east’s heavy engineering, coal mining, shipyards and other industries that dealt with asbestos. Between 1985 and 2005, some 2,387 people in the north-east died of mesothelioma, and that is not counting all the other asbestos-related illnesses people died from. In that period, 192 people died in Durham, 72 of them in my constituency.
I agree that it is very important to talk about the figures, but I have dealt with these individuals and have seen the awful way in which they die and the agony their families go through––and the poverty, because it is the breadwinner who goes from many of these families. I therefore know that we are not talking about people who have access to large amounts of discretionary income or expenditure. They need this compensation. It will not be a luxury for these individuals but something to support their loved ones in future.
The key thing people who are dying from mesothelioma say they want is help so they can leave money and know their families are taken care of. They want to be able to die with the knowledge that their families will be taken care of. That is not always possible. As has been said,
thoroughness in these cases is very important. There are certain firms with a specialism in doing asbestos work, but I have come across some atrocious solicitors as well, who have taken on cases but, frankly, should not have been let loose on them at all.
In many cases, these individuals would not have got access to justice through the courts system if it had not been for the trade union movement. That is true not only in terms of their individual cases, but also in taking forward some of the very expensive early test cases that established the case law in this area.
That we have a Bill is welcome, but it is a very disappointing Bill. Much has been said about the insurance companies and, having dealt with them over a number of years, I can tell Members that trying to get money out of them can be very difficult, as sometimes they will try anything in order not to accept a claim, not only in these areas but in other personal injury cases as well.
The insurance companies have done very well out of this Government. They have convinced everybody that there is a claims culture in this country, which there clearly is not if we cut away from the headlines and look at all the actual evidence. They have got assistance through changes in the law that help them rather than the victims in a whole array of personal injury cases, and they are going to get off the hook again under this Bill as it stands, because, basically, what it does is cap their liability.
The estimate is £350 million. That is a large sum of money to individuals, but we also need to consider that the insurance companies have not only not paid out for these cases that they took premiums for over many years, but they have had the premiums and then failed to pay out about £800 million of claims on them. If we add it all up, £350 million is not a great deal of money.
It is also not a great deal of money if we look at the profits the insurance companies have made over the previous few years. Let me mention a few, just to give a flavour. Lloyd’s of London posted pre-tax profits of £1.5 billion between January and June 2012 and its profits for the whole of 2012 were £2.77 billion. Royal Sun Alliance had pre-tax profits of £233 million between January and June 2012. The £350 million being offered here is therefore in stark contrast to the profits that some of these companies are making.
In fact, according to the Bill, these companies will not pay the money themselves anyway, because it will be a levy that they will get from future premiums. In the other place, Lord Freud said:
“The levy will be imposed on active employers’ liability insurers at large, not on the individual insurers who took the premiums and who were on cover in the cases that will come to the scheme.” —[Official Report, House of Lords, 20 May 2013; Vol. 745, c. 691.]
So the insurance companies are not even dipping into their profits for the scheme as it stands. If that is not a good deal for them, I do not know what is. They have been in the driving seat, and the Government’s argument, certainly in the other place, has been that if we do what the hon. Member for Chatham and Aylesford wants to do—increase the compensation level to 80%—that would somehow be a show-stopping moment.