Search for
Search for
Search forLawyer claims victory for asbestos victims
Wednesday, December 03, 2008, 08:06
Solicitor Peter Hankins has fought for more than 30 years for industrial injury compensation for ex-employees of former Chalford-based asbestos firm Fibrecrete and their families, who were often made terminally ill having worked at the company.
Now the latest twist in the rollercoaster trail of legal successes and setbacks has come with this month’s test case judgment defeating insurers, including BAI, which provided employer’s liability cover for Fibrecrete.
“It is a milestone. I feel enormous relief for the families involved,” said Mr Hankins, consultant to Rowcroft solicitors AES Winterbothams.
“This is probably one of the most aggressively fought areas of injury and disease in my professional life,” he said.
“This is also a very important case for Stroud as the lead defendant insurer was BAI and six test case victims defeated the insurers.”
Mr Hankins said for years BAI had regularly paid out to victims of diseases like mesothelioma and lung cancer from the date of their exposure to asbestos particles.
Then from 2007, the insurers tried to argue that compensation should instead be triggered by the date when the disease manifested itself, which was often 30 or more years later than the original exposure.
By this time most, if not all, insurance policies would have long since expired.
Their case was, however, rejected by the High Court on November 21 after six weeks of arguments.
Fibrecrete closed in 1971 but asbestosis and similar illnesses have an incredibly long “tail”, or lead-in time.
“If they’d won there would have been nothing more disappointing than finding that, after working through a case with either a very ill person or a widow, that there was no insurance policy to pay out their compensation,” Mr Hankins said.
“These men are totally innocent but die dreadful deaths with these illnesses. There are also the wives and daughters who washed their clothes for them and inhaled the asbestos particles. These women had not done anything wrong and yet they too are deprived of their health.”
Mr Hankins, who said he came into his profession on a vocation to “right all wrongs”, expects asbestos cases to peak in about 2015.
Currently there are about 1,500 mesothelioma deaths a year in the country, four or five of which are in Stroud.
“During the test case litigation BAI admitted that over the last two years they had rejected 284 fatal mesothelioma claims, whose families are consequently still awaiting compensation averaging £125,000 each, which is a total of a staggering £35.5 million,” Mr Hankins said.
Click here for more from our dedicated website for Stroud news and information
Comment on this story