Retired electrician David Smith, 70, still can’t believe the dangerous behaviour that used to horrify him on building sites. ‘God,’ he says. ‘I remember guys mixing asbestos fibres into a paste with their bare hands. Half of them are probably dead now.’
Terry Cowell, a former heating engineer, 77, shudders at the memory of his younger self, ripping off white asbestos ropes and pale brown lagging to get to the boilers he had to replace.
‘I didn’t have so much as a mask,’ he says. ‘I was just breathing that stuff in.’
And 38-year-old roofing inspector Liam Bradley regularly warns young colleagues to be careful when they find asbestos – but often they just laugh at him. ‘They stop laughing when I tell them I breathed it in and one day it’s going to kill me,’ he says.
David (not his real name), Terry and Liam have one thing in common: they all have mesothelioma, an incurable cancer caused by inhaling asbestos fibres. The disease affects the mesothelium, the membrane on the outside of the lungs, heart, intestines and abdomen, and can cause tumours in or around any of these.
It can sometimes be slowed down with chemotherapy and immunotherapy, but there is no cure. It takes from 20 to 60 years for symptoms to appear but, once they do, most patients die within a year.
What David, Terry and Liam also share is a heightened concern for tradespeople on building sites today.
The Daily Mail’s ‘Asbestos: Britain’s Hidden Killer’ campaign has been launched to persuade the Government to introduce a phased removal of asbestos from public buildings, starting with schools and hospitals
Terry Cowell, a former heating engineer, 77, shudders at the memory of ripping off white asbestos ropes. Terry, pictured with his wife Karen and daughter, has mesothelioma
And they are right to be worried. A survey of 500 construction workers shared exclusively with the Daily Mail has uncovered a terrifying lack of understanding of just how lethal asbestos can be – and a cavalier attitude among some bosses when it is found on site.
The survey, conducted for educational company High Speed Training by TLF Research this year to mark the 25th anniversary of the banning of asbestos, found that 35 per cent of tradespeople didn’t think the material was hazardous.
And more than a third wrongly thought it was a problem of the past – when it is in fact still around us all.
There are thought to be at least 6 million tonnes of it in more than 1.5 million UK buildings, including 83 per cent of schools and 90 per cent of hospitals.
Worryingly, almost half of the tradespeople polled – 46 per cent – thought that what little asbestos training they had received was inadequate. And, most frightening of all, 26 per cent said they hadn’t bothered following safety precautions when they found it – with a quarter of those saying they were pressured into dealing with it unsafely by their bosses.
‘I find it so sad that nothing seems to have changed,’ says David, from Leatherhead, Surrey. ‘This many tradespeople not understanding how dangerous asbestos can be when so many of our buildings need renovating and upgrading – it’s like a ticking timebomb.’
David believes his asbestos exposure occurred in the 1970s when he worked in London as an electrician for a large construction company. ‘We would refurbish anything from schools and hotels to shopping centres, and they would have lots of asbestos in them,’ he says. ‘You would be disturbing it, crawling over it, and we had no asbestos training and no safety equipment.
‘I was an apprentice but the only education I got was from an older electrician. When we used to come across guys mixing asbestos with their hands, he said, ‘We should get out of here. This isn’t good for us’.’
David continued working until 2017 – and he says that attitudes to asbestos had not changed even then. ‘It’s just a case of ‘Get the job done’,’ he says. ‘The commercial pressures are horrendous.’
David was diagnosed with mesothelioma 18 months ago when he began having slight breathing problems. He has never smoked and was a fitness fanatic all his life, so being told he could only have a short time left came as a terrible shock to him, his wife Natalie and three grown-up daughters.
He has some thickening of the pleura, the lining of the lung, but is generally in good health. ‘I get a bit tired but I’ve been fit all my life so I’m hoping that will stand me in good stead,’ he says.
The Daily Mail’s ‘Asbestos: Britain’s Hidden Killer’ campaign has been launched to persuade the Government to introduce a phased removal of asbestos from public buildings, starting with schools and hospitals. It also calls for the establishment of a national digital asbestos register that can be accessed by smartphone.
This would pull together asbestos records already required by law into a simple app that could be accessed and updated from a handset. This would help tradespeople be sure of where asbestos is located before carrying out works that could disturb it.
All the tradespeople I interviewed backed our calls for the digital register, as did Ian Dowd, marketing director of High Speed Training. His father, Patrick, was diagnosed with mesothelioma in October 2022 and died last summer aged 76.
‘They gave him 18 to 24 months and he died somewhere in the middle of that,’ says Ian. ‘He was on chemo and immunotherapy and perhaps that slowed it down a bit. He was going to the gym and playing with the grandkids, but then he declined and got very sick. He died at home in late June.’
Ian thinks his father was exposed to asbestos multiple times over several decades.
‘Ironically, he worked in health and safety for various organisations in the 1960s, 70s and 80s before they really knew much about asbestos,’ he says. ‘A lot of what he did was food hygiene and safety. So he would be in boiler rooms, ceiling shafts, all the places where you’d find asbestos.’
Ian’s occupational training company, shocked by the results of the survey, have now decided to set up asbestos courses. ‘The levels of ignorance were very worrying,’ he says. ‘Many tradespeople seem to think it’s a problem of the past – an old man’s problem – but it isn’t. Many are being exposed to a material that could give them incurable cancer, a cancer that should be avoidable.’
Liam Bradley, our roofer from Nottingham, says he regularly encounters fellow roofers who remove asbestos with neither the correct training nor personal protection equipment.
Liam Bradley, 38, was diagnosed after he fell from a third-storey roof in 2015, breaking his neck, hip, ribs and elbow – and collapsing his right lung. During an operation to fix it, surgeons found suspicious white flecks that turned out to be the early stages of mesothelioma
Liam stays fit and healthy, determined to spend as much time as he can with his wife, Bryony, and daughters Piper, Harper, and Nevaeh
‘When I tell them they are crazy to be handling asbestos so dangerously and that they could develop cancer, the response is often: ‘Well, it’s an old man’s disease – I’ll be in my eighties when it gets me so I’ll be on the way out anyway.’
‘When I tell them I was diagnosed at 30 and have three daughters but might never see my grandchildren, they tend to take it more seriously.’
Liam’s diagnosis came unusually early, after he fell from a third-storey roof in 2015, breaking his neck, hip, ribs and elbow – and collapsing his right lung. During an operation to fix it, surgeons found suspicious white flecks that turned out to be the early stages of mesothelioma.Â
‘As soon as I was told, I knew exactly where it was from,’ he says. ‘In 2006, I’d worked on a newbuild property but we’d had to join the roof to an older factory next door. When we’d stopped for lunch, the site manager asked us all to wash our hands because there was evidence of asbestos.
‘I remembered then feeling uneasy. We didn’t have dust masks or any other asbestos-related health and safety kit.’
Liam has had treatment to stall the growth of the cancer, and regular scans have so far shown it has been successful. But he has no way of knowing when that will change.
‘When the consultant asked me what symptoms I was suffering from, I couldn’t answer her – I had none,’ he recalls. ‘I was still playing football and working full-time. I wasn’t breathless, or tired. I didn’t feel ill, yet suddenly I’d been given a life-limiting diagnosis.
‘The following six months were a blur because it wasn’t just me having to live with it. I had to tell my parents, my in-laws, family members, friends. My mum and dad sobbed. ‘I can’t bury my son,’ Mum had wept.’
Liam stays fit and healthy, determined to spend as much time as he can with his wife, Bryony, and daughters Piper, three, Harper, five, and Nevaeh, ten.
‘When I try to educate workers about the danger of asbestos, I tell them I may not live to see my children get married – it’s a sobering thought,’ he says.
‘There needs to be much better training among tradespeople in how to spot asbestos and what to do when they find it. There’s at least one whole generation of people who’ve probably never heard of it. That has to change.’
What must also change is the attitudes of some companies and bosses when asbestos is found.
‘Rather than seeing it as a danger to workers to be carefully handled, some see it as a nuisance to be inappropriately dealt with to avoid cost,’ says Vince McCoy, London regional officer for the union Unite.
‘And when experienced tradespeople raise concerns, they are often seen as troublemakers.’
That was the case only a few months ago at the site of a major building renovation in the capital. A worker – we shall call him John – raised concerns over signs in an area where he was told to work, an area he had been assured was asbestos-free. I have seen photographs of the signs, which warn: ‘Danger Asbestos. No works to be undertaken to plaster-board lining. Potential asbestos.’
When he raised concerns with his line manager, and his health and safety officer, he was told there was no asbestos and to carry on. When he and other workers – who did not have protective equipment – raised further concerns, John was fired and frogmarched from the site.
I have spoken to John about the incident but he has asked that we not identify him or the company involved. He is afraid of being ‘blacklisted’ by other builders and losing his livelihood.
Vince, who negotiated a settlement with the company for John, says: ‘There is a culture of fear when it comes to speaking up. If you see someone being frogmarched from a site for raising concerns about asbestos, you’re less likely to speak if you find it.’
Having survived five years since his diagnosis, Terry is highly unusual. His wife Karen, 62, puts it down to an immunotherapy treatment – nivolumab – which he receives privately as a result of a legal settlement with his former employer’s insurers
All of which our heating engineer Terry, from Huddersfield, finds very disappointing. He was diagnosed with mesothelioma in 2019 and had to cast his mind back to establish when he was exposed. In his case, he had worked for a company in the 1970s that gave him the job of replacing ‘dozens’ of old boilers in council houses in and around Blackpool.
‘I’d be taking the floorboards up and crawling underneath, ripping off all the old lagging from the pipes,’ he says. ‘It was asbestos, like white rope. I had no training and no protective equipment. I didn’t even have a mask. That there is such a lack of awareness to this day is very worrying.’
Having survived five years since his diagnosis, Terry is highly unusual. His wife Karen, 62, puts it down to an immunotherapy treatment – nivolumab – which he receives privately as a result of a legal settlement with his former employer’s insurers.
‘We’ve been lucky so far and we just hope he keeps reacting so well,’ she says. ‘What we can’t understand is the lack of asbestos awareness among younger people.
‘There needs to be more training – short films on the impact of mesothelioma on people who used to do the same jobs as them. It would make them sit up and take notice.’
She adds: ‘If workers found a gas leak on a building site, they’d be running away from it as fast as they could. It should be like that if they find asbestos, but all too often they’re just told to crack on without adequate knowledge or protection. And one day that could cost them their lives.’
The Construction Industry Training Board, sponsored by the Department for Education, is responsible for education in the British construction industry.
Asked about the dissatisfaction with training thrown up by the survey, it responded: ‘Raising understanding of the dangers and training people of all ages in safe workplace practice is critical for the construction sector.
‘Over the past two years, we have provided over £3 million in grants for asbestos training courses to more than 53,000 trainees, working with more than 2,200 employers… We have also supported more than 800 trainees with asbestos training qualifications.’
But Graham Watts, chief executive of the Construction Industry Council building trade association, says that only the responsible companies make use of such training. Irresponsible companies don’t bother with it to save money.
‘There is no licensing of contractors in the UK,’ he says. ‘In the absence of any formal licensing system, we have a ‘free-for-all’ in which professional bodies and trade associations attempt to do the right thing by imposing self-regulation on their member firms.
‘But of the 250,000-plus building/construction firms in the UK, only about 10 per cent belong to professional bodies or trade associations. The vast majority are unregulated.
‘Businesses that ask their employees or self-employed supply chain to deal with asbestos inappropriately should be reported to the Health and Safety Executive. This can be done confidentially.’
In the meantime, poor practices among companies that don’t bother educating their workers lead to corners being cut and risks being taken – often, as Liam has found, with nothing more than a shrug, an ignorant laugh and a deadly intake of breath.
