7.7Witness statements and evidence-tracing

Forty years is a long time. When you sit down with a solicitor to start a mesothelioma claim, you will be asked about jobs you held in 1976, foremen who are now dead, factories that have been bulldozed and insurance companies that have been swallowed by others three times over. That’s normal. Nobody walks into this with a tidy paper trail.

The good news: you don’t need to remember everything yourself. The job of the legal interview is to map your working life with the help of records you can request, archives a specialist firm already holds, and other people’s memories.

The records you can request, free.

• HMRC employment history. HMRC keeps a schedule of every employer who paid you (or for whom you paid National Insurance) going back to 1975 in most cases. Request it free using form CA5403 or via a Subject Access Request to HMRC. It usually arrives in four to eight weeks and is the single most useful document for proving who employed you and when.
• NHS medical records. A GDPR subject access request (SAR) to your GP and to any NHS trust that has treated you costs nothing and must be answered within one month. Your solicitor will need these for the medical-causation side of the claim.
• Former employers’ personnel records.SARs to companies you worked for — even ones that have changed name — can produce shift records, training certificates, photographs and contracts. Many firms keep paper archives much longer than you’d expect.
• Pension administrators. Pension schemes hold dated employment records that often outlive the employer.

The records your solicitor will pull.

• Companies House. Confirms whether a former employer still exists, who owns it now, and the dates of any name changes, mergers or dissolutions.
• The Employers’ Liability Tracing Office (ELTO).A central database of UK employers’ liability insurance policies, searchable by employer name and date. Most specialist firms have direct ELTO access and old insurer lookups going back decades.
• Trade-union archives.If you, your spouse or your parent was a member of a union, the union’s legal department often has minute books, asbestos-survey reports and member rolls for specific workplaces.
• AsbestosIQ. The public exposure database (chapter 7.16) cross-references the workplaces other patients and their families have already documented. If somebody else has logged the same shipyard in the same year, your solicitor finds it instantly.

The things money can’t buy back. Old photographs from your working life. Pay slips, P45s or P60s in a drawer. Work badges, hard hats with stickers, union cards, apprenticeship certificates. The names of two or three people who worked alongside you in each job. Anything dated. Tell your solicitor about all of it at the first meeting.

What a witness statement is.A signed account of your working life as you remember it, in chronological order, written with your solicitor over one or two appointments. It runs to perhaps 15 to 30 pages by the time it’s finished. It names employers, addresses, dates as best you can give them, the work you did, the asbestos you remember being there, the people who supervised you, and the names of anyone who could confirm any of it.

What it isn’t.Not a test. Not a stress about every forgotten detail. Not something you have to write alone. If you can’t remember an exact year, say ‘around 1976’. If you can’t remember a foreman’s first name, say ‘Mr Patel’. Honest gaps are fine. Filling gaps with guesses is not — the other side’s lawyers will find the guesses.

If the patient has died.A statement can still be put together from family memories, the work history kept by HMRC, and what former colleagues remember. The Civil Evidence Act 1995 specifically allows hearsay evidence in this situation, so things the patient told you — about a particular foreman, a particular site — can be included.

A practical order of work.

1. This week:request your HMRC employment history (CA5403). It’s the slowest item, so it must go first.
2. While you wait:write a rough timeline of your working life on paper or in a notes app. Don’t worry about accuracy — you’ll correct it later against the HMRC schedule.
3. Find your people:ring two or three former colleagues from your dustiest jobs. Ask if they’ll be a named witness later.
4. Submit to AsbestosIQ (chapter 7.16) once you’ve agreed it with your solicitor. It builds the record for others, and it builds your own record at the same time.
5. Sit with your solicitor (chapter 7.4) when the records arrive. They’ll turn the rough timeline into a witness statement and tell you what to chase next.

None of this is your job alone. Specialist firms run this drill several times a week. Their archives reach back to the 1950s. The point of the first meeting is not for you to walk in with everything — it’s to start the search.