Understanding the UK’s asbestos disaster

With over 5,000 people dying from asbestos exposure each year, the UK has one of the highest rates of asbestos-related deaths in the world.

Tom White knows first-hand the pain that asbestos can cause families. He was only 6 years old when his grandfather, Albert Popple, died aged 64 from mesothelioma as a result of asbestos exposure earlier in his life. White’s book, Bad Dust, tells the story of asbestos in the UK from the 19th century through to today. 

In this Q&A, he explains how the UK’s asbestos disaster unfolded, its wide-ranging impact, and the lessons the country must learn from it. 

 

How does Britain perceive asbestos in 2026? 

White: Britain used so much asbestos and had such a big asbestos manufacturing industry that there is the thought that we have already processed the asbestos horror and outrage.

In the late 1990s, when New Labour fully banned asbestos, they weren’t saying “we’re banning this material, but it’s still a massive issue because it’s in buildings in huge quantities”. Their approach was that “we can kind of all forget about it and move on”. A quarter of a century later, we’re living with the consequences of that.

I start the book with the story of Helen Bone, a nurse practitioner from Middlesbrough. She talked about how she associated asbestos diseases with men who worked in heavy industries decades ago. She was 38 when she was diagnosed with mesothelioma in 2021, and was understandably shocked.  She died in 2024, aged 42.

There is perhaps a lack of awareness and knowledge about asbestos among younger generations, which speaks to how the material has receded from public consciousness. There’s no reason to know these things, until it is too late.

When did industry know that asbestos could be lethal? 

White: First was asbestosis, which acquired its name in the 1920s, by analogy with byssinosis (caused by the inhalation of textile fibres) and silicosis (caused by the inhalation of silica dust from rock, stone, sand, and clay). It’s a traumatic injury to your lungs caused by inhaling large amounts of asbestos dust, which comes mainly from working directly with asbestos. It’s a progressive disease, and incurable. Even if you stop working in an asbestos factory and you have asbestosis, it’s going to gradually get worse and worse.

What emerged in the 1940s and into the 1950s is that asbestos is also carcinogenic. Then one of the big moments in the asbestos story comes in the late 1950s in South Africa, where a group of researchers are studying asbestos miners. And they come across this other issue with people in that area – mesothelioma.

At the time this was a very, very rare and very aggressive form of cancer, which had been mentioned very infrequently in medical literature going back to the late 1800s. That study in the late 1950s essentially proved that mesothelioma is caused by asbestos. The implication was huge for other people working with asbestos, but also more generally that people exposed to relatively low levels of asbestos (such as neighbours to asbestos mines and family members of mine workers) could be at risk of developing this cancer.

One of the things it’s important to remember about asbestos-related lung cancer and mesothelioma is that the latency periods between when you are exposed and when the illness actually manifests can be very long, up to several decades.

How has asbestos impacted different groups of people in the UK over time?

White: The first wave of asbestos-related deaths is the generation of people who worked in asbestos manufacturing in factories from the 1860s onwards. This was an era before workers’ health and safety was seriously considered. People were being exposed to huge quantities of dust, and many were soon suffering from asbestosis. If you started working in an asbestos factory when you were 16 or 17 and you reached your mid-thirties, you were probably doing pretty well.

Conditions improved somewhat, and by the post-war period people weren’t being exposed to the same levels of dust as they had been 30 or 40 years earlier. But the amount of asbestos being imported and used was much higher, as was the total number of people being exposed.

This next wave of asbestos deaths is among people who aren’t involved directly in manufacturing asbestos, but who work with asbestos products: plumbers, electricians, engineers, and shipyard workers, for example. A lot of those people are not dying from asbestosis; they’re contracting mesothelioma and lung cancer.

There’s a realisation, from the 1950s onwards, that the number of people who are at serious occupational risk from asbestos is significantly larger than the companies were saying. Historically, it could also be quite difficult to get a firm diagnosis. A lot of people wouldn’t necessarily have known that they were exposed to asbestos, so there is often a sense of shock.

The impact on working-class families was huge. For families in Glasgow, particularly for people working in shipyards spraying asbestos-containing insulation materials, there was a risk of lung cancer and mesothelioma, and asbestosis as well. By the time they were in their 30s or 40s, lots of men were too ill to work and would soon die from their diseases.

If you’re from a working-class family and the provider in that family passes away, then if you are a teenager, you might have to leave school to get a job. You might decide you can’t go to university. There are all these intergenerational effects. This isn’t an isolated event that happens to one person. It has all these repercussions: financially, emotionally, and psychologically.

The third wave of asbestos deaths includes all those who have been exposed as asbestos-containing materials deteriorate or are disturbed, whether in their workplace, at home, or elsewhere. Basically, this is everyone who lives in the UK! If the first and second waves are a horrific occupational disaster, then the third wave is a vast environmental and infrastructural catastrophe.

Despite an increasing awareness that asbestos is highly toxic, what did the asbestos industry do to counterattack against its critics? 

White: There were concerns about tobacco being carcinogenic by the early 1950s. A famous American PR firm that worked with the tobacco industry, Hill & Knowlton, encouraged the tobacco companies to band together and bankroll a research body, which they called the Tobacco Industry Research Committee. It sounds respectable and independent, but it was actually funded and its research agenda completely controlled by the tobacco industry.

The British asbestos industry realised that it could do something similar. With the help of Hill & Knowlton, they founded the Asbestosis Research Council in 1957.

By the early 1960s, there were powerful voices like Dr Irving Selikoff, a well-known physician in New York, who did a lot of research on the health impacts for people who are working with asbestos products, like plumbers and electricians. And Molly Newhouse, who did a study in London on exposure for people who lived near asbestos factories. There is a developing picture that this material is really dangerous, and that there’s an occupational and infrastructural disaster looming.

The asbestos companies have, by this point, invested significant amounts of money in mines, distribution networks and factories; they have large amounts of sunk capital, and that is part of the motivation to create doubt about the health risks of asbestos for as long as possible.

The companies realise at that point that they have to produce as much doubt as they possibly can. They can’t prove that asbestos is safe, because it isn’t. So to produce doubt, you keep the question open for as long as possible, and the way that manifests itself in a lot of these studies is that they’re very narrowly focused studies on very complex topics.

We’re still miles and miles away from any worldwide ban on asbestos.

There’s nothing wrong with that work in itself, but part of the intention was to ignore the obvious social facts, which is that thousands of people were dying due to asbestos exposure.

As time goes on, other companies and industries have been able to adopt these tactics in their own way, such as with fossil fuel companies and climate change.

The actual reality is staring everybody in the face. But by keeping this question open for as long as possible, they can keep on extracting asbestos (or oil) out of the ground, and keep profiting from it.

It’s still an effective strategy today. We’re still miles and miles away from any worldwide ban on asbestos. A lot of people are surprised that it took until 1999 for asbestos to be fully banned in the UK. They’re even more surprised to hear that it’s not banned in lots of other places in the world.

The government was responsible for regulating the asbestos industry. Why did it fail to do so? 

White: It won’t come as a surprise to lots of readers the extent to which the asbestos companies were able to exert their influence on the government.

The first asbestos regulations were in 1931, and the asbestos industry at that point was quite well organised amongst itself. To regulate the prices of raw asbestos around this time, they operated like a cartel.

They were then also effective at directing the discussion around what those regulations should contain. They pushed to limit the regulations to quite specific areas of asbestos manufacturing, which were called ‘scheduled areas’. Only particular types of work with asbestos were covered by these regulations, not covering lots of different people who were working with asbestos, for example, workers in asbestos cement factories.

The industry was able leverage these distinctions into the legislation. And then once the legislation came into effect, they said, “Well, this isn’t our decision”.

A lot of the companies didn’t follow the regulations anyway, but it was quite hard for the government or the factory inspectors to prove that. Besides, the fines that were given out were completely incommensurate with the practices that they were engaging in. It was essentially a small tax on really dangerous but profitable behaviours.

That dynamic was there from the 1930s, and then the regulations weren’t updated until the end of the 1960s. Then the 1969 asbestos regulations under Harold Wilson’s Labour government came in, which again were really led by the industry. They were really able to direct what happens with those regulations and to resist any meaningful challenge to their practises at that point.

What about the unions? 

White: The broader trade union movement and leadership were, for a long time, very poor on asbestos.

They recognised it was dangerous to work with, but more took that as an opportunity to say, “Well, you should use it to negotiate for more money”. For instance, woodworkers in Glasgow were being told that they should negotiate tool allowances, because cutting asbestos sheets were destroying their tools more quickly.

The broader approach of trade unions had a more conciliatory line with employers. There was a medical advisor for the TUC, called Robert Murray, who became a figure of criticism for a lot of anti-asbestos groups. He wanted unions to work with the employers and seemed to side with employers over the individual trade union branches that were trying to draw attention to the impacts of asbestos and its dangers.

These individual trade union branches had come to the conclusion that working with asbestos in a healthy job and a healthy society were completely incompatible.

There were individual trade union branches that were very good and radical on the question of asbestos, and were really working hard from quite an early point, in the 1970s and 1980s, to try and make the case for a ban on asbestos.

These individual trade union branches had come to the conclusion that working with asbestos in a healthy job and a healthy society were completely incompatible.

In a particular branch of the Transport and General Workers Union on the shipyards in Glasgow, for example, a guy called John Todd was very active and knowledgeable about asbestos and was an organiser in that union. He was basically blacklisted by employers, and heavily criticised by his own union leadership and by the Scottish Trade Union Council as well.

Part of the reason why a lot of the anti-asbestos movement comes out of these more independent figures like Nancy Tait and Alan Dalton is because it was very difficult for trade unionists to win the argument within their whole union.

Then, after Alice: A Fight for Life on ITV was aired in 1982, the response was huge. Tenant support groups and anti-asbestos groups on a local level spring up after that is broadcast, and trade unions do lots off the back of it. The government kicked into gear a little bit and hastily introduced these measures that they’d been kicking their heels on.

What lessons do the bigger trade unions need to learn from the asbestos disaster in the UK? 

White: One lesson is the importance of grassroots involvement with knowledge about the industries that people are employed with.

A theme I come back to a lot in the book is that it’s the people who work in the factories, who see the effects on their own bodies and on their colleagues, who develop quite robust bodies of knowledge around this topic. Yet when they try to organise, or try to bring this to the attention of the broader trade union, it comes up against this more bureaucratised approach.

I’m an active trade unionist. I want to be part of democratic trade unions. I think any effort towards democratisation, encouraging grassroots actions, and supporting members in individual branches with their struggles are the major lessons.

You tell the story of asbestos in Britain, but include a chapter on southern Africa. Why was that important to do? 

White: The thing I realised straight away is that it’s impossible to tell the story of asbestos in Britain without also telling the story of asbestos mining in the south of Africa.

One of the reasons why the asbestos disaster is so deadly in Britain is that we imported a lot of asbestos from South Africa, the only country where three types of asbestos were mined (white asbestos, brown asbestos, and blue asbestos). Brown (amosite) and blue asbestos (crocidolite) are particularly dangerous when it comes to low-level or incidental exposure that could lead to lung cancer and mesothelioma.

It began with British companies operating in the south of Africa in the late 1800s having their mining operations protected and furthered by the British imperial project.

Asbestos, because of the way it occurs geologically, is often quite close to the surface. Mining asbestos in the early days of the industry in South Africa was often done by groups of people on quite small scales.

When the demand for asbestos really began to spike in the 1940s and 1950s, asbestos mining in South Africa developed into what we would usually think of as a large-scale industrialised mining operation, with deep shaft mines in one place and excavating large amounts.

That’s the point at which the asbestos companies realised that to produce the amounts that were being demanded, they needed to have these bigger operations. That entailed having lots of workers within the mine compound. They were supposed to pay them wages and provide accommodation for them, but the conditions in the mines were just horrendous.

Asbestosis occurred really, really quickly in these conditions. For a lot of those people, they didn’t live long enough to develop mesothelioma or lung cancer. Looking at the figures that we have on asbestos-related deaths, it is generally safe to assume that they are a massive underestimate of the amount of actual asbestos-related disease.

Today, a lot of the old asbestos mines in South Africa still haven’t been remediated and are polluting the local environment. Meanwhile, in Britain, these old asbestos products like ceiling panels are being disturbed or have degraded, releasing these particularly dangerous types of asbestos fibres from South Africa into the air.

What about the status of asbestos in the UK in the 2020s? 

White: What happened in the late 1990s was a reliance on the idea of managing asbestos in situ. It was already the default approach of successive British governments, partly because it was the cheapest option.

The idea behind management in situ and the Control of Asbestos Regulations, which governs asbestos management, is that asbestos is basically fine if you leave it in place. This presumes that it’s sealed off from the daily interactions that people have with the built environment, that it isn’t already degrading and releasing fibres into the air, and that building owners have an up-to-date record of where asbestos is in the building and what condition it’s in.

What was always a hopeful and optimistic approach, in theory, has in practice become increasingly deadly.

But asbestos products, like any industrial products, have a design life. In the 27 years since asbestos was banned, what’s happened is that the gap between the theoretical basis for management in situ and the actual reality of asbestos in buildings has grown and grown.

This idea that it’s behind the wall, in good shape and that you only have to worry about it if you drill a hole into it was always slightly dubious in theory. Now, it’s just completely unrealistic. When asbestos surveying firms have done large-scale surveys, they’ve found that most of the asbestos-containing materials in buildings are already in poor condition. What was always a hopeful and optimistic approach, in theory, has in practice become increasingly deadly.

An increasing number of countries are proactively launching asbestos removal programmes.  Australia may be the furthest ahead with this, but South Korea has done something similar in schools, and Poland has attempted to do something similar. Those programmes have their own challenges, and there are various criticisms of all of them.

But in an international context, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for Britain to maintain its current position.

How can victims of asbestos exposure receive justice today?

White: James Kelman, an author involved in anti-asbestos organising in Glasgow, said “money is not justice”. And compensation is not commensurate with your health.

I think for some people justice would involve those responsible for this going to prison for a long time. There is anger at the asbestos companies still, and justifiably so, but a lot of them don’t exist anymore in any sort of meaningful sense. And a lot of the people who were responsible for a lot of these decisions, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, are long gone.

This is partly why I think the best available option is a large-scale asbestos removal programme.  It wouldn’t be the same as legal action against the people who ran these companies and made very comfortable lives for themselves trading this material.

But it would be a serious attempt to mitigate this problem and to stop what are completely preventable deaths in the next 10, 15, and 20 years.

Bad Dust is out now.