The epidemic of asbestos diseases among British electricians

Paul Phillips knew he wanted to be an electrician before he left school in Liverpool at 15. For six decades, from the start of his apprenticeship in 1961 until his retirement in 2012, he worked non-stop.

Electrical work was his passion. “He’d go around looking at people’s wiring and sockets and things all the time,” Phillips’ daughter, Su, told Confront. “There’d always be neighbours or friends saying, ‘Could you just come and look at this?’ And then he’d end up rewiring the whole house in his spare time.”

Phillips, like many electricians through the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s in particular, encountered asbestos in his work. Asbestos was ubiquitous and could be found among thousands of different products including switchboards, plasterboard, and insulation.

The UK began regulating asbestos due to rising cases of asbestosis, which is scarring of the lungs, in factories as early as 1931. By the 1940s, asbestos was discovered to cause lung cancer. When Phillips started his apprenticeship in 1961, the industry had already learned asbestos causes mesothelioma, a fatal cancer of the mesothelium almost exclusively caused by asbestos exposure – even among those not working with it.

Those considered to need protection from asbestos were largely confined to select asbestos factory workers, according to the government and the industry itself.

The asbestos products that plumbers, joiners, roofers, construction workers, electricians and many others encountered on a frequent basis were disregarded as risks. Most asbestos products didn’t have labels on them until 1976.

“They’d just be covered in asbestos. It’d be like snow.”

The results have been catastrophic. Diseases from asbestos are the leading occupational killer in the UK, with over 5,000 people in the UK dying from asbestos exposure in 2023, according to official figures.

The impact has been felt extensively by electricians and their families. Between 2000 and 2022, 1,370 electricians were recorded by the Health & Safety Executive (HSE) as dying from mesothelioma, a supposedly rare cancer. But the true number is even higher.

The average age of a mesothelioma victim in the UK is 75, but these figures from HSE don’t include deaths of people over 74 years old, as their profession normally isn’t included in death certificates.

HSE also estimates that for every mesothelioma death, there is another death from asbestos through lung cancer, though some scientists say this ratio is an underestimate.

It wasn’t until updated Asbestos Regulations came into force in 1970 that tradespeople like electricians were given any protection by the law. But even then, enforcement was weak, public knowledge of the risks of cancer was low, and even if enforced properly, the permitted thresholds of asbestos dust at that time continued to risk people’s health.

Su recalls a job her dad did in the 1970s: “So there was him, tilers, the roofers … and they’d all follow each other around in turns to get all the jobs done. He said they’d just be covered in asbestos. It’d be like snow. They’d be drilling into the ceiling, removing things, and they’d just be covered in all this white powder.”

Earlier in his career, Phillips didn’t know of any workers who had gotten sick from asbestos. It often takes decades for symptoms to appear. But as time passed, he started to hear bad news from his colleagues. “I remember my dad first said about one of his colleagues, they thought it was lung cancer,” Su said, “and then they’d found out it was to do with asbestos. He said, ‘But I was working alongside him.’”

Phillips had worked six and seven day-weeks for much of his career, and though retired in 2012, he stayed active — particularly in his garden. He was the youngest of eight siblings, and during his retirement could spend more time with his partner, two daughters and four grandchildren. But his family became concerned for his health over the next few years, with his daughter Rachael noticing how he had struggled with breathlessness climbing up the stairs to her flat.

By 2019, Su’s husband, Sam, called her one day, saying, “I’m really worried about your dad.” They’d gone to Costa, and Phillips couldn’t catch his breath walking from the parking lot. Then the pandemic hit in 2020. When a lockdown was lifted in the autumn of 2020, and Su saw her father up close again, it was clear he had a serious problem.

Sixty years after the first significant scientific study connecting mesothelioma with asbestos, Phillips would hear the word for the first time when being diagnosed with it by his doctor. There’s no known cure.

“It was a shock to him,” Su said. “Obviously he’d heard of asbestos-related things, but I don’t think he’d heard of mesothelioma. He couldn’t say it.” Phillips had what Su describes as a “typically scouse” sense of humour. At least, he said, upon learning he probably had six to nine months to live, his funeral would be on a nice summer’s day.

“He still thought it was going to be something that he would be cured of”

After his diagnosis, Phillips did four rounds of chemotherapy. He tried immunotherapy. But neither treatment helped. Mundane routines became daily challenges. A man who was once highly organised and self-sufficient, who took detailed notes of every electrical job he’d ever done, had to rely on others for basic tasks.

Even with his health deteriorating a few weeks before his death in 2021, Phillips was in his garden for the August bank holiday at what would be his last family gathering, weeding in his chair. He offered one of his grandchildren to finish the weeding for him for some pocket money.

Later that same week, Phillips was once again breathless. Paramedics came to his house to give him oxygen and then took him to the hospital. “He still thought it was going to be something that he would be cured of, assisted with,” Su said. “And he kept saying, when am I going to be able to go home?”

But he wouldn’t return home. On September 20, 2021, Phillips died in the hospital.

Su is now passionate about raising awareness about those who are at risk of asbestos diseases. Her father’s meticulous note-taking and diagnosis of mesothelioma meant they could make the connection with asbestos as his cause of death. But for many others, particularly those who died from lung cancer, this is not always the case.

“When you start to dig around,” Su said, “you just hear how widespread it is. You think, how does everyone not know about this?”