This is quite a difficult and personal debate for me today. I was brought up in that world capital of asbestos-related diseases that the hon. Member for West Dunbartonshire (Martin Docherty-Hughes) so eloquently described. Indeed, my mum’s name is one of the many—too many—on a memorial in Clydebank to those who have died of asbestos-related lung disease. She did not qualify for compensation under the scheme because, as well as the length of time the disease takes to emerge making it difficult to pursue a legal claim successfully, the many and diverse conditions triggered by asbestos can also create problems with linking it directly to the workplace. There is still much work to be done in that regard. It was years after the asbestos factory closed, and more than 30 years from the time when my mum had worked in the shipyard office, that she was diagnosed when her symptoms emerged. The conditions brought on by breathing in that dangerous substance are no respecters of time, and the toll and the impact that they have, both emotionally and physically, on the victims and their families is huge.
Like previous speakers, I would like to mention the work done over many years by Clydeside Action on Asbestos and others. I remember my mum remarking
on the irony—she thought it was actually quite a nice irony—that so many people who had worked together in the 1960s whom she had known in the John Brown shipyard and not seen for years were brought together in mutual support in a campaign to help one another. But for many of us—many of their dependants—that was tinged with a huge sadness, because these were people we had known as our parents, aunts, uncles and friends of the family, who had been young and vibrant, with lives ahead of them, but who now had been brought so devastatingly low by asbestos-related conditions.
We have heard about the legislation in 1979 and the first decade of this century, which has gone a long way to helping those victims of asbestos-related diseases, but we still have so much more to do in ensuring better workspaces and ensuring better compensation for those affected by these and so many other workplace-related injuries and illness. So I have no hesitation in supporting this motion.
3.15 pm