Mind the dust: Asbestos disease and the London Underground

For millions of passengers, the London Underground is an enduring symbol for the modern, vibrant city. But hidden within its tunnels lies a darker legacy.

Underground staff have been working alongside asbestos for over ninety years. As time passes, more and more former engineers, maintenance staff and station workers are diagnosed with asbestos-related diseases.

Transport for London (TfL), the public body that owns the London Underground, has now paid out millions of pounds in compensation relating to asbestos exposure.

While asbestos has been banned in the UK since 1999, the threat has not disappeared. Thousands of asbestos-containing materials remain in stations, tunnels, tracks and buildings across the Underground network.

TfL says it has strict controls in place to ensure customers and staff are not at risk from asbestos. Yet two men have told Confront that recent events reveal a pattern of carelessness with potentially deadly consequences for workers.

‘Visible asbestos fibres’

Like many young Irishmen of his generation, Patrick Lonergan moved to the UK in search of work. He had planned to work on a farm, but instead built a career in the railways.

 

 

He began as a steam engine fireman before joining London Transport, TfL’s predecessor, in 1977. By 1992, he had become a technical-grade inspector.

One night that year, Patrick was asked to cover a shift overseeing asbestos removal contractors at Highgate Station.

Asbestos had been widely used throughout the Underground: in brake blocks, noise-reduction panels, ventilation shafts, tunnel linings and cable coverings, among other products.

By the early 1990s, its dangers were well established. Asbestos exposure had been connected to asbestosis since the 1920s, lung cancer by the 1940s and mesothelioma by 1960.

That night, contractors were removing crocidolite, or blue asbestos, from around steel tunnel rings, where it had been used to muffle the noise from passing trains. Crocidolite is considered the most hazardous type of asbestos.

Patrick asked for protective equipment. He was given disposable overalls and a paper mask.

“It was just a DIY mask that I had,” he said.

Regulations in force at the time required suitable respiratory protection.

“Now, I believe they have vacuum cleaners, and they’re dressed like spacemen,” he said.

Patrick remembers watching contractors scrape asbestos from tunnel rings while fibres floated through the beam of his torchlight.

The consequences of asbestos exposure almost always pass unnoticed at first, and not everyone exposed is diagnosed with a disease. Decades can go by before disease develops.

For Patrick, that reckoning came more than 25 years later.

Black clouds of dust

The 1999 asbestos ban did not include a timeline for removing the material from existing buildings and infrastructure. Damaged or disturbed asbestos products in infrastructure can release fibres into the air, creating a continuing risk.

In 2004, the government introduced a legal duty requiring ‘duty-holders’ such as TfL to identify and manage asbestos safely.

For TfL, one of London’s largest landowners, the task has been immense. According to a Freedom of Information request filed by Confront in 2024, TfL still records more than 20,000 asbestos-containing materials across its network.

London Underground workers who do work during engineering hours can be especially vulnerable because their jobs can bring them into contact with hidden parts of stations and tunnels where asbestos-containing materials remain.

Micky Steeds was one such worker.

Steeds worked for London Underground Limited (LUL), a TfL subsidiary, as a skilled operative from 2018 to 2023. His overnight shifts took him into ventilation shafts beneath platforms, crawl spaces, old corridors and lift shafts in stations.
His team carried out a process known as “sweeping”, using vacuums with long hoses and stiff brushes to remove thick black dust mainly created by trains and passengers.

The work created black dust clouds so dense, Steeds said, that he could not see his hand in front of his face.

Dust covered workers’ faces, hands and overalls. According to Steeds, it sometimes penetrated their protective equipment. The dust may include hazardous materials such as arsenic and asbestos, court documents show. Steeds says he did not receive asbestos safety training until 19 months after starting the job.

“None of us knew what it was. None of us knew how to dispose of it. None of us were trained in handling it,” he told Confront.

As he became more aware of the risks, he said he noticed how little his team understood about asbestos.

“We were going into crawl spaces where you had asbestos cables,” he said. “We didn’t know at the time that asbestos-sheathed cables were rubbing up and down our overalls. We were bashing into asbestos cables,” said Steeds.

“We weren’t aware of how dangerous the dust was.”

Managers had described the black substance as “nuisance dust”, Steeds said. But a report he and a colleague later read, Control of Substances Hazardous to Health (COSHH), classified it as special or hazardous waste because it contained carcinogens.

The Control of Asbestos Regulations require employers to provide adequate information, instruction and training to employees who may be exposed to asbestos. The rules also set strict requirements for waste disposal and protective clothing.

Steeds says he later reported that workers were putting 20kg bags of contaminated dust into general waste bins rather than hazardous waste containers.

He also raised concerns about the lack of proper respiratory protection. When he started, his team used disposable P3 paper masks. During a fit test in March 2019, Steeds learned that his mask had not been sealing properly against his face.

Later that year, LUL provided his team with half-face respirators. But the dust irritated workers’ skin, and several, like Micky, grew beards, which continued to prevent the masks from sealing safely.

Two years later, Steeds asked his supervisor for a full-face mask because he said he could not shave due to skin irritation.

Instead of helping him obtain one, Steeds says his supervisor warned him to be careful because the request could mean he would no longer be able to do his job.

Steeds interpreted the remark as a threat.

Blowing the whistle

Steeds began gathering evidence. “At the time, I could see there was going to be a stitch-up,” he said. “I knew they’d come for me, but it was the principle. They’d put us all in danger.”

In early 2023, after reporting an incident involving seemingly disturbed asbestos-sheathed cables at Manor House station, Steeds and a colleague went on sick leave. They refused to return to work until their safety concerns were addressed.

Steeds was dismissed in August 2023.

In March this year, he won an employment tribunal after the judge found he had been dismissed for raising concerns about unsafe practices.

Judge Hodgson found that LUL had failed to recognise Steeds’ reports as protected whistleblowing disclosures. He said improper waste disposal “may lead to other workers, and the public generally, being exposed to hazardous waste, including asbestos” and that Steeds’ belief that the issue was in the public interest was reasonable.

Steeds still worries not only about other workers, but also about passengers using the Tube after overnight cleaning and maintenance work.

“You’ve got young kids. Everybody gets on the Tube,” he said. “From all walks of life, and everybody’s breathing in asbestos after people have been working down there. And they know that.”

A TfL spokesperson said: “We have strict controls in place, in line with the government’s Control of Asbestos Regulations, which ensure customers and staff are not at risk from exposure to asbestos when travelling or working on the Tube network. Our specialist teams monitor and manage locations where asbestos has been found to ensure the safety of everyone travelling or working on the network.”

TfL also said it was considering the findings of Steeds’ tribunal judgment.

“Their own membership seems to be put at risk because of this.”

When Confront reported on asbestos management in the Underground in March, the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT) said it was concerned that TfL had no system for identifying workers who may have been exposed when asbestos risks were discovered.

The union told Confront TfL relied on self-reporting of asbestos exposure to TfL by employees, and that some records of potential exposure had been lost during administrative reorganisations.

RMT said maintenance and operational staff work near asbestos-containing materials daily and called for better recording of possible exposure.

But the union itself has also been criticised. Steeds says he tried to raise his concerns through RMT’s official union channels, including senior leadership, but felt little was done to support him.

RMT’s former assistant general secretary Steve Hedley told Confront he was astonished that union leadership had not taken Steeds’ allegations more seriously.

“They’ve got elected officials; none of them seem to have done their job,” he said.

Micky also reached out to another elected official, London’s Mayor Sadiq Khan, who serves as chair of TfL’s board, without success.

Neither RMT nor the office of the Mayor of London responded to a request for comment.

Fighting for treatment

The fear of developing an asbestos-related disease now weighs heavily on Steeds.

“Am I going to wake up one day, cough up some blood?” he said. “That’s the reality of life now because I’ve breathed that stuff in for so long.”

Those fears were the reality facing Patrick Lonergan in 2018.

After retiring, Patrick returned to Ireland. It had already been a difficult year: his wife of more than 50 years, Pam, had died.

Then he began experiencing shortness of breath.

A painful biopsy of his right lung revealed sarcomatoid mesothelioma, an aggressive cancer caused by asbestos exposure.

Doctors told him he had between six and 15 months to live.

Devastated, he then attempted to take his own life.

With characteristic understatement, Patrick described that period as “not very nice”.

Patrick underwent chemotherapy and joined a clinical trial for a new cancer drug, but the disease continued to spread.

The next treatment option was immunotherapy, which was not then available free on the NHS. The cost was around £20,000.

Patrick pursued a legal claim against TfL to fund the treatment.

With the support of his solicitor, Catriona Ratcliffe of Leigh Day, Patrick got an interim payment from TfL which he then used for immunotherapy. The eventual settlement also covered his ongoing medical care.

“Patrick’s case was argued on the basis that his exposure to asbestos could have been prevented entirely but instead, having recognised the need to bring in contractors to do this work, London Transport sent in one of their own, untrained employees,” Catriona Ratcliffe told Confront.

“We argued that even if the inspection he carried out really was unavoidable, steps should have been taken to reduce any exposure to the minimum level at source, for example by dust extraction, and Patrick should have been provided with training and suitable respiratory protective equipment. Patrick’s evidence was that the only control measure taken was a simple paper mask. In the circumstances he described, this would have been completely inadequate and a breach of the regulations.”

Even with immunotherapy, the odds for Patrick remained poor. Side effects from the drugs severely affected his eyesight, which was already weak.

But the treatment worked. Six years later, Patrick is 84 and spending time with his family. He has five children, 11 grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren across the UK and Australia.

A former trophy-winning cross-country runner, Patrick cheered on his granddaughter Danni in the London Marathon a few years ago. He has also flown to Australia twice to visit family.

“He can never sit still for long,” his son Corey said. When living with his daughter in Maidstone, he goes into the town centre to see new friends in a coffee shop.

Corey says surviving cancer changed their relationship. “We had a strained relationship when I was a kid, but we get on okay now,” he said. “That’s something that wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t survived the cancer.”

He added that he values the stories Patrick tells about Ireland in the 1940s and 1950s.

“The information about my family and the stories would have died with him if the cancer had got him,” Corey said.

Patrick’s response to the treatment defied the odds; most people with mesothelioma die within a year of diagnosis.

When he was told about Micky Steeds’ tribunal over receiving poor PPE, Patrick said, “I’m not surprised.”

A problem that never fully went away

Concerns for London Underground workers’ health go back nearly a century.

Dr William O’Donovan, MP for Mile End, asked the Home Secretary in 1932 “if he is advised that the precautions taken to prevent fatal lung diseases in workers lining London tubes with asbestos are adequate?”

It was in the 1960s and 1970s when the UK’s use of asbestos peaked. Government inaction and industry campaigning meant that millions of tonnes of asbestos were used and people continued to be exposed, even after asbestos dust was known to be capable of causing fatal disease after brief exposures in 1965.

Today, more than 5,000 people die each year in the UK from asbestos-related diseases, making it by far the UK’s largest occupational killer.

The toll among London Underground workers is difficult to measure. TfL says it cannot provide data on asbestos-related compensation claims before 2002.

Between 2002 and 2024, TfL received 146 claims, averaging about seven new claims a year. It has paid out £7,034,813.25 in compensation and legal fees relating to these claims. Some claims were withdrawn or not settled, and some workers may also have been exposed while employed elsewhere.

Lawyers told Confront that asbestos exposure causing lung cancer, the most common asbestos disease in the UK, rarely leads to compensation claims for victims. This is because workers may be unaware of their exposure and because proving causation in individual cases is difficult.

While some former employees, like Patrick, have secured compensation, others can face life-threatening cancer without financial support.

Solicitor Michael Wolstencroft, who recently represented a former Underground worker preparing to make a claim, said recent legal cases have allowed employers to avoid liability for asbestos-related cancer treatment.

Health and safety campaigners have also criticised the government’s approach to asbestos management.

In 2022, a Department for Work and Pensions committee recommended creating a national asbestos register and a 40-year plan to remove asbestos from public and commercial buildings, beginning with the highest-risk materials. Those recommendations have not been implemented.

Asbestos may have been banned in the UK for more than a quarter of a century, but the UK’s asbestos crisis is far from over.