What is the most outrageous Government-supported scam in Britain today? Obviously there are a number of contenders. One is the Public Finance Initiative (PFI) whereby we pay private contractors up to three times the value of the hospitals and such that they build. Another is the Great Wind Scam, whereby we pour billions of pounds into the wind industry, to supply us, very unreliably, with derisory amounts of electricity. But there is shortly to be a legal challenge to another hugely costly scam – or part of it, at least – based on the way powerful lobby groups have managed to hijack government policy on the emotive and widely misrepresented subject of asbestos.
On behalf of some 50,000 farmers, and supported by the National Farmers’ Union, Bryan Edgley, who farms 2,500 acres in Buckinghamshire, is asking the High Court to declare unlawful a new set of asbestos regulations which, his lawyers will claim, are wholly unworkable, not based on proper science and could present farmers with a quite unnecessary bill for £6 billion.
The story of how the framing of national asbestos policy has been taken over by a group of lobbyists centres on the deliberate confusion of two very different minerals, both given the unscientific name “asbestos”. It is 50 years since the world first learnt of the dangers of exposure to the amphibole (or “blue” and “brown”) forms of asbestos fibre, iron silicates which remain in the lungs for years and can cause horrifying diseases such as mesothelioma. But in the years that followed, a systematic attempt was made to blur this type together with the very much commoner “white” asbestos, a magnesium silicate which quickly dissolves in the human lung, and which, particularly when it is used as a bonding agent in cement, poses no measurable risk to health at all. The fibres in cement (90 per cent of all asbestos products in the UK) undergo a chemical change which makes them no longer respirable.
The lobby groups that chiefly benefit from this confusion include the licensed contractors, who charge exorbitant sums for removing asbestos cement; and the lawyers who bring compensation claims on behalf of clients who no longer need to prove that their disease was caused by asbestos. Insurance companies do not even bother to contest such claims, knowing that they can be paid for by raising premiums for all their other customers.
Farmers are particularly vulnerable because some 50,000 British farms have buildings containing asbestos cement, which must eventually be replaced. The new Control of Asbestos regulations, which came into force in April, make it virtually impossible for farmers to remove and dispose of asbestos cement without the very costly help of the specialist contractors who lobbied for the regulations.
Mr Edgley, supported by expert scientific advisers, is seeking a judicial review of these ill-drafted regulations, on the grounds that they conform with none of the six basic criteria governing such law – not least because they create an “exposure threshold” which cannot be scientifically measured. Among many other requirements, they also compel anyone who requires the removal of asbestos to pay for everyone involved to be medically examined every three years thereafter, with all records to be kept for 40 years.
Since 2008, Mr Edgley and his advisers have been trying to put their case to ministers of the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), which is responsible for asbestos regulation through the HSE. Eventually, the Government’s chief scientific adviser, Sir John Beddington, a population biologist, was asked to hold an inquiry. But the Beddington committee consisted largely of members already firmly wedded to the official view, and Mr Edgley was astonished to discover that they did not even consider the scientific evidence that he and his team had supplied to the inquiry.
That is why Mr Edgley has decided that the only way the farmers’ case can be heard is by bringing a case in the High Court against Iain Duncan Smith, as the DWP’s Secretary of State – although the responsibility for the Beddington inquiry lay with his junior, Chris Grayling (whom Mr Edgley’s legal team will ask to attend the High Court, to explain why the committee was not shown the evidence).
Like many other businesses, the farmers face a double whammy, thanks to an extraordinary judgment last year by the Supreme Court, which opened the door for almost any business to be sued for compensation by anyone who can claim to have been dangerously exposed to asbestos while working for them. As I reported at the time, the court’s president, Lord Justice Phillips, not only made no distinction between the harmful and harmless forms of asbestos, but began his judgment with a scientific howler, by stating that probably every case of mesothelioma results from exposure to asbestos.
Phillips did not appear to have read the scientific literature, which shows that at least 25 per cent of mesotheliomas occur naturally, and many more may be attributable to the Salk polio vaccine. Virtually none, if any – as the HSE itself stated in 1996 – have been caused by exposure to white asbestos. But Phillips’s judgment has paved the way for a host of new compensation claims from people who may not have been damaged by asbestos at all – but which, thanks to his ruling, are scarcely worth contesting.
Finally, one part at least of this many-headed racket faces a serious legal challenge. It will be particularly interesting to hear Mr Grayling explain why the Beddington committee had no opportunity to examine the scientific evidence which was the reason it was set up in the first place.
source: telegraph.co.uk
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