On 1 July this year, the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Occupational Safety and Health published its report on the legacy of Cape Asbestos, which was founded in London in 1893. The company owned asbestos mines in Africa and factories across Britain, relying on imperial domination and, later, South Africa’s apartheid government, to keep mining costs low and profits high.
The asbestos industry grew steadily, if unspectacularly, during the first half of the twentieth century. The material was combined with textiles to produce heatproof covers for machinery and boilers, and added to cement to make corrugated roofs, gutters, and water pipes. But it was after 1945 that Cape and the other firms really began to cash in. Amid the post-war rebuilding, businesses successfully cultivated the associations between ‘the magic mineral’, safety, and modernity to market a growing range of industrial and consumer products. Schools, hospitals, housing, and countless other buildings were built with asbestos-containing materials — pipe lagging, wall and ceiling panels, floor tiles, window frames, and external cladding.
It was also during this period that the full extent of the material’s health impacts became apparent. It had been known since the early 1900s that exposure to asbestos dust caused asbestosis, an incurable fibrosis of the lungs. Then, in the post-war period, it became clear that even trivial exposures could cause lung cancer and mesothelioma. By the early 1960s, asbestos-related cancers were running rampant among those who were not employed directly in the industry but regularly worked with or near asbestos: insulation engineers, carpenters and joiners, builders, plumbers, electricians, and plasterers. The implications were clear — an occupational health disaster was being reframed as an environmental and infrastructural disaster — and Cape played a key role in the decades-long attempt to cover up the material’s deadly carcinogenic qualities. Asbestos is still the leading cause of occupational deaths in the UK: the Health and Safety Executive estimates that it kills around 5,000 people every year (though anti-asbestos campaigners believe this figure is a serious underestimate and that the real total may be closer to 20,000).
Cape sold many of its asbestos mines and factories in the 1980s and reinvested the profits in other areas of its business. In 2017, the company was acquired by the construction conglomerate, Altrad. The All-Party Parliamentary Group recommended that the government back the Asbestos Victims Support Group Forum’s Cape Must Pay campaign — which has called for Altrad to donate £10 million towards cancer research — and to issue no more public contracts to the company until it pays up. ‘Cape’s deadly legacy has destroyed thousands of lives, and the company has yet to show real accountability. As the parent company, Altrad now carries that responsibility,’ said its chair, Labour MP Ian Lavery. The Group also made a third recommendation: the government establish a phased asbestos removal plan.
Asbestos was finally banned in the UK in 1999. Its prohibition was a significant and hard-won victory for campaigners and trade unionists, but there was no attempt by New Labour to introduce a coordinated removal programme. Instead, successive governments have relied on a policy of management in situ. This approach is based on the idea that asbestos is low risk as long as it is monitored and left undisturbed. Yet, in reality, we know that monitoring procedures are deeply flawed (where they exist at all) and that basically all asbestos-containing products are now well past their intended design life and are either degrading or already damaged. ‘That old maxim that “asbestos is safe if left undisturbed” is not true and never was true,’ campaigner Charles Pickles recently wrote, it is ‘the biggest lie in public life in Britain today!’
There is an obvious place for a large-scale removal programme to begin: schools. A 2019 Department for Education survey found that 81 percent of schools still have asbestos ‘present on their estate’. Asbestos-containing materials are frequently disturbed by the curious, mischievous or bored hands and feet of children, releasing fibres into the air, unseen. The consequences can be disastrous: research suggests that a person first exposed to asbestos at five years old is roughly five times more likely to develop mesothelioma than someone first exposed at thirty.
The National Education Union (NEU) has long been demanding better air monitoring in schools and meaningful progress towards an asbestos removal programme. In her 2024 report What is the real risk from asbestos in schools?, researcher and former teacher Gill Reed estimated that at least 1,400 school staff and 12,600 former pupils died from mesothelioma between 1980 and 2021. Extrapolating from these figures, Reed warned that future deaths could run into the hundreds of thousands, particularly if austerity-ravaged buildings are left to deteriorate even further. Reed emphasised that this ‘rising mesothelioma death toll was… not an accident.’ Rather, it was ‘the policy of successive UK governments to cut costs rather than develop asbestos regulations, which lowered the lifetime risk of staff and students developing mesothelioma in school buildings.’
Some nations have chosen to address this challenge. In 2016, the South Korean Ministry of Education ordered that asbestos be removed from all schools by 2027. The government has allocated 2.872 trillion won — £1.8 billion — to the programme. The Australian Asbestos Safety and Eradication Agency was founded in 2013 and is also coordinating a multi-phase National Strategic Plan to eliminate asbestos-related disease in the country. Schools have been one of the first targets, not only to protect the most vulnerable but also as an effective way to raise awareness. When parents hear that asbestos is being removed from their child’s school, the thinking goes, they will be more likely to check their homes and workplaces for the material as well.
In my book Bad Dust: A History of the Asbestos Disaster, I examine how the material became so deeply embedded in the built environment and the functions of the British state, as well as how successive neoliberal governments foreclosed the possibility of an appropriate response to its dangers. Looking to the future, I argue that we can’t just think about asbestos removal as a technical and logistical challenge. Given the scale of this slowly unfolding disaster, it is also a challenge to the political imagination and the Left’s ability to build effective coalitions.
Removing asbestos from schools, for example, should be just one element in a much larger remaking of our education system. This remaking would also entail, among other things: vastly increased funding; smaller class sizes, and free school meals for everyone; the immediate end to regressive ‘control pedagogies’; autonomy for teachers and schools to develop inclusive, climate-minded, and anti-racist curricula; restored access to the arts for all; democratisation and the abolition not only of the academy and grammar school systems, but of private education, too. Of course, there is little to suggest that ‘Grey Labour’ has any interest in a positive and substantive programme of this kind. But as the policy of managing asbestos in situ becomes increasingly discredited and indefensible, there will be an opportunity for education workers and their allies to make the case not just for its removal, but for building something entirely new out of the ruins.