Asbestos In Armley

Just after I was first elected to Parliament in 1987, I met a journalist from the Yorkshire Evening Post, Mr Richard Taylor, who told me that at the coroner's court in Leeds there were too many chest disease related deaths from people living in the Armley Lodge neighbourhood of Leeds. What's more, from the 1870's until 1956 there had been an asbestos mattress and boiler lining factory there called JW Roberts'. Were people in the neighbourhood dying as a result of asbestos dust blowing out of the factory onto the streets? In 1988 I raised a full debate on the JW Roberts' factory in the House of Commons and appealed for help in getting justice for the Armley asbestos victims. We tracked down Turner & Newall (T&N), a British multinational based in Manchester who had bought out JW Roberts' and made it part of T&N.

The lawyers moved in to take on T&N on behalf of the Armley victims, and after a titanic struggle of accumulating evidence and documentation, and two more parliamentary debates, the case against T&N was proven - as owners of JW Roberts' they were liable. JW Roberts' were guilty of polluting the neighbourhood and the people who lived there.

A single fibre of asbestos lodged in the lung can lead to deadly mesothelomia - it may take 40 years to work through. Youngsters who played in the nearby streets in the 1940's and 1950's were entering into the danger zone in the 1980's and 1990's. Of course not everyone who lived there got mesothelioma, but the court case was a groundbreaking one - a company had been held to account for criminal irresponsibility towards the local neighbourhood environment.

Now, worldwide, asbestos-related disease claims are pouring into companies who were responsible for failing to protect their workers and failing to respect the local environment. Courts increasingly condemned them and ordered them to pay compensation. Lawyers have taken on the companies through the courts and since the key case was won five years ago in Leeds, compensation for victims has been coming through.

Until now. T&N has gone through a takeover deal with an American multinational, Federal Mogul, who have contrived to get out of their asbestos liabilities by declaring the asbestos liabilities bit of the company bankrupt - while the rest of the company sails on picking up millions of pounds worth of contracts.

In other words, by using bankruptcy laws, the company has found a way to ditch its asbestos liabilities and refuse to pay anything more to any victims. People are still dying as a result of living near JW Roberts'. Their families are being told they have no one to claim against because the company has just gone bankrupt.

This evasion is a scandal. Making the polluters pay obviously means not only proving responsibility, not only winning the moral and legal arguments, but taking on high level international corporate gamesmanship that continues to write off the lives of asbestos victims. I naively thought we'd won the case and left the lawyers to get on with claims and settlements - but now that justice is being thwarted, the campaign for the victims is being resurrected. This is a struggle for a just society that must be won.