Wednesday, 4 April 2007

• Hundreds of former dock workers can sue the government for compensation for asbestos-related illnesses

• The Court of Appeal has today upheld a High Court test case decision last year that the government is liable to compensate former workers.

• The test case was brought by specialist law firm John Pickering and Partners LLP, on behalf of a 65-year-old former docker, Robert Thompson of Scarisbrick, near Southport, and the widow of another docker, Winifred Rice, of Ormskirk, whose husband died in 2000, aged 67 years.

• Lawyers for the Department of Trade and Industry took the case to the Court of Appeal in an attempt to reverse the high court ruling. A successful appeal would have blocked the dockers’ compensation claims.  The appeal decision will allow hundreds to be compensated by the government instead of them hunting in vain for liable dock employers that no longer exist.

• Kevin Johnson, a partner at John Pickering and Partners LLP, says it is right that the DTI, the government department acting on behalf of former dock labour boards, has been made to take responsibility: “The Court of Appeal has given former dock workers and their families the lifeline to financial security that they so badly needed.  By the time these men become ill through asbestos, they can’t trace and pursue many of the private dock companies that employed them.  But the dock labour boards knew they were exposing the men to harm by allowing them to work unprotected.”

Contact with Winifred Rice and Robert Thompson can be arranged through John Pickering and Partners LLP: 

Background

John Pickering and Partners LLP
John Pickering and Partners LLP is a specialist legal practice that has represented claimants in the leading asbestos "test cases" in the last ten years.

The firm represented Sylvia Barker in Barker v Corus (UK) Plc, a case that highlighted the legal tactics of employers and insurers trying to cut back their compensation liabilities to mesothelioma sufferers, and which prompted the amendment of the Compensation Act 2006 to ensure full compensation for mesothelioma claims.

The firm represented two of the three claimants in the Fairchild appeal, in which the insurance industry tried unsuccessfully to block compensation altogether for mesothelioma sufferers unable to identify which of two or more sources of asbestos exposure had caused their illness.

The National Dock Labour Board
Until 1967, dock workers were employed on a casual basis under the National Dock Labour Board scheme, set up by the government in the late 1940s to organise labour arrangements at ports.

Many dockers unloaded raw asbestos from ships, causing illness decades later.

Until now, former dockers with asbestos illnesses have found it difficult or impossible to pursue compensation claims, because of problems identifying the firms responsible for the asbestos: the workers were often transferred between different shipowning and stevedoring companies daily or weekly, many of the companies are insolvent or have ceased to exist and their insurers cannot be traced or have themselves become insolvent.

 These problems have resulted in former dockers dying from asbestos cancers without compensation to provide for the families that survive them.  It is this that has given the impetus to the claims against the government, in its role as supervisor of labour at the docks and guardian of dockers’ health and safety.