1.4A short UK history of asbestos

The Romans noticed asbestos. They wove it into napkins and tablecloths that could be cleaned by throwing them on the fire. They also noticed the slaves who quarried it died young.

Industrial use in Britain started in the late 1800s. Asbestos went into the boilers and steam pipes of the railways, then the shipyards on the Clyde, the Tyne, the Mersey, Belfast, Portsmouth and Plymouth. By the 1930s, the dangers were known to the industry; the first British asbestos compensation cases reached the courts before the Second World War. The wartime expansion of shipbuilding and dockyards exposed hundreds of thousands of men and women to dust.

Through the 1950s, 60s and 70s, asbestos was sprayed and packed into almost every kind of building. Schools, hospitals, offices, council houses, factories, power stations, oil rigs, vehicles, domestic boilers, Artex ceilings, ironing boards, hairdryers, hospital screens. The use of brown and blue asbestos was banned in 1985 after years of campaigning by trade unions, doctors and bereaved families. White asbestos remained legal in new products for another 14 years and was finally banned on 24 November 1999.

A ban on new use is not a ban on the asbestos already in our buildings. Estimates of how much remains vary, but a working figure is that around half of UK homes built before 1999 still contain asbestos somewhere, and roughly 80% of UK schools still have asbestos in the fabric of the building. The Health and Safety Executive estimates that more than 20 tradespeople a week still die in the UK from past exposure, and total UK deaths from asbestos-related disease remain above 5,000 a year.

Exposure routes you’ll hear in clinics include:

• Shipbuilding, repair and breaking
• Power stations, refineries, gas works
• Construction trades (lagging, plumbing, electrical, joinery, roofing, plastering)
• Railway and vehicle engineering, including brake-lining work
• Boiler-making and boiler maintenance
• Asbestos cement manufacture (notably at Hebden Bridge, Armley in Leeds, Barking, and Rochdale)
• Schools, hospitals and council buildings — both staff and pupils
• Secondary or ‘para-occupational’ exposure, often a spouse, partner or child washing a tradesperson’s overalls
• DIY and renovation in older houses

If your route of exposure isn’t on that list, that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. The point of the legal interview later is to find it.