UCATT MP Calls Insurance Industry ‘Jackals’

Michael Clapham MP, the chair of the UCATT parliamentary group has today described the insurance industry as acting like “jackals” in their concentrated attack on paying compensation to victims of industrial illnesses.

Mr Clapham was speaking in a Westminster Hall debate about the ongoing fight to restore compensation to victims of pleural plaques. Pleural plaques are scarring of the lungs caused by heavy and long term exposure to asbestos. Pleural plaque victims are a thousand times more likely than other people of contracting the fatal lung cancer mesothelioma which kills 2,000 people a year.

Last year the Law Lords ruled that pleural plaques should no longer be a compensatable disease, as it did not cause physical symptoms. Mr Clapham described how this verdict was wrong. A leading medical expert on pleural plaques Robin Rudd a Consultant physician, has stated that pleural plaques are a pathological change in the membrane which surrounds the lung, victims of pleural plaques are liable to pleural thickening causing breathlessness, lung cancer and mesothelioma.

Dr Rudd also found that pleural plaque sufferers suffer severe mental anxiety following diagnosis, as they fear that they will die from mesothelioma, which is incurable.

Mr Clapham also revealed that a leading accountancy firm had estimated that the Law Lords decision on pleural plaques was set to save the insurance industry £1.4 billion.

Asbestos campaigners now fear that the pleural plaques decision is the tip of the iceberg as the insurance industry are now targeting all industrial illness compensation payments.

This week the insurance industry launched a High Court challenge concerning mesothelioma payments. Currently, the insurer of the company who exposed a worker to asbestos pays compensation. The insurance industry is claiming that under many insurance policies this is incorrect. Instead mesothelioma victims should receive compensation from the company insurer, at the time the cancer develops. It is feared that if the insurance companies claim is successful then many mesothelioma victims will not receive compensation. Most cancers caused by asbestos develop 20-30 years after exposure.

Mr Clapham accused the insurance industry of gross “hypocrisy” as on the one hand their representatives make statements that they want to make payments to mesothelioma victims easy and straightforward, then in the next breath they launch expensive legal cases to deny victims compensation.

Jim Sherdian MP described asbestos victims as “being treated worse than cattle”. He argued that if animals experienced the same diseases, then the middles classes would demand that swift action was taken. The fact that it was working class people, who suffered such injuries and deaths, meant that the middle classes and the Law Lords were indifferent to their suffering.

The Government has committed itself to launch a consultation package to ensure that Pleural plaque victims should receive some form of compensation. However UCATT fear that the Government may lack the courage to fully overturn the House of Lords ruling.

UCATT are planning to dramatically increase their campaign in the coming weeks if the Government’s proposals fall short of the union’s hopes.

For Further information contact Barckley Sumner on 0780 2329235