Ian McCartney MP

Like my colleagues, I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire, North (Jim Sheridan) and congratulate him—if that is the appropriate word in such a debate—on his work on this and other issues.

My hon. Friend and I come from a similar area, and as teenagers and young men, we saw family after family suffer the consequences of having done what they were asked to do by working hard for their country and their company. Subsequently, because of latent industrial diseases, the trade union movement has spent 45 or 50 years fighting for recognition of what has happened as a result of industrial processes. People who have worked hard and contributed have been damaged as a result, but there has never been a general acceptance of the fact that they should receive financial, social and medical recognition for the effects of their contribution.

The most recent judgment is the latest in a long line of judgments since 1924. There has been a failure to accept and recognise that exposure to asbestos and mesothelioma are deadly. The first case was reported to the British Medical Journal in 1924 by Dr. Cooke from the Wigan Royal Albert Edward infirmary. The lady concerned, Mrs. Kershaw, worked in a weaving shed in the constituency of the hon. Member for Rochdale (Paul Rowen). He was the first doctor to say, “This woman has died not of tuberculosis but of fibrosis caused by her exposure to asbestos dust.” Yet from that moment it has been a struggle to get where we have.

The present situation is incredible. Despite what I have described, I never thought that I should be asking in the House of Commons to have something back that had already been conceded. We are not asking for something new to be recognised. There has already been medical recognition, state recognition—by way of benefit payments—and recognition towards compensation. My worry is what will happen if we do not win this case and find a mechanism, as we have in the past.

In 1998, my right hon. Friend the Member for Leeds, West (John Battle) was the Minister for Energy, and he found a mechanism to upgrade the payments relationship for pneumoconiosis sufferers. We found a mechanism to deal with issues such as bronchitis and emphysema that has resulted in the biggest payouts on injury benefits that the world has ever seen, and the House found a legislative mechanism, as my hon. Friend the Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (David Heyes) mentioned, to deal with a recent perverse judgment by the Law Lords.

Perhaps we can find a mechanism to correct the decision that we are now discussing. If we do not, there will be debates here for the next 10 years arising from this judgment’s use in other areas, against other claimants with other injuries. Let us think of the progress that has been made on stress-related injuries in Britain since Unison, the National Union of Public Employees and others took on that cause. It has become accepted as fact that there are certain circumstances in which, if employers do not act in their employees’ interest, they will suffer damages because of stress. That is an accepted concept, but the Law Lords have gone out of their way to state in the judgement that, unless a physical injury is associated with the stress, no claim can be met. What does that mean for public sector workers who attend accidents every day and suffer trauma and stress? They have no physical illness, but there has been the capacity for more than a decade to compensate those workers for the stressful job that they do.

I am not a lawyer—I do not want to give the impression that I am—but lawyers and others have the unending capacity to take one decision and link it to other potential decisions. Therefore, what has been decided is important not only to the sufferers; it should make us recognise the importance of retaining what we have won. We must retain it: there are no grounds for not finding a mechanism.

I know that the Minister will want to respond, and I have one final point. If the Law Lords’ judgment is read in a common-sense way, it suggests that the plaques do not occur naturally in the body, but are caused by an industrial process, which the law recognises in judgments as a failure by the employer to protect the interest of the employee. What is missing is a common-sense judgment.

The Law Lords have taken common sense out of the way they have dealt with it. They have cited, as the ABI has, the figure of 1 per cent. The figure of 1 to 5 per cent. is not relevant: what is relevant in the cohort is that 100 per cent. have plaques. However, it cannot be judged who, within the cohort, will go on to contract a debilitating disease that will kill within 18 months of diagnosis. So all must suffer 100 per cent., to the point when the disease transforms from a plaque into a cancerous fibre, followed by death. That is why the Law Lords’ approach is not a common-sense one.

We must put common sense back into the law, but in putting it back, we must put back something else. The courts have already recognised that negligence led to the disease. The state gave recognition, in relation to payments, and there was recognition through previous court judgments that the insurance industry had a liability to meet, which it was meeting. On that basis, taking a common-sense view—difficult as it is for the state to meet every claim in every circumstance—we should go back and deal with the cases that have been left in limbo and accept that the diseases have been caused by workers doing the one simple thing that they have been asked to do: work hard and look after their home community.

Those communities are devastated. Not every community in Britain faces the same circumstances. Those affected are from shipyard and mining communities. They are textile workers and those who worked in industries making products for other industries or who travelled around in the construction industry, building up our capacity to power our houses, shops and commercial enterprises. That generation is now suffering. The debate is an opportunity for us: if the Minister cannot respond as we would like her to do now, I hope that she will leave the door open for further discussions towards a solution, because a solution must be found.