175: PAUL FOOT 2026: CUTTING CORNERS

0:00Hey, it's your ceiling vent, so I'm dripping. Could be the rain, could be the upstairs bathroom. Yikes. You could hire the guy your neighbor recommended, but I'm pretty sure that's just his cousin. Do we know if he's licensed or does he just own a ladder? Listen to your home. Go with Thumbtack. Upload a photo or voice note and we'll diagnose your project and match you with the right pro for the job. Thumbtack. We know homes. Hire the right pro today. Andy and Anna here from your new favorite podcast, No Such Thing as a Fish. Yes, we are two of the four hosts of the podcast that stuffs fascinating, amazing, weird, mad facts into your ears on a weekly basis.

0:47You got any good facts, Andy? Yes. How about this one? Anteaters have evolved on 12 separate occasions. Wow. Mysterious. Wonderful. The world really wants them to exist. What about this one? When Ronald Reagan left office, he left a note on the White House lawn for the squirrels, warning them to beware of George Bush's dogs. So there you go. If you like fascinating facts and much more besides, we are no such thing as a fish. Hello and welcome to page 94. My name is Andrew Hunter-Murray and I'm here in the private eye offices about to interview the shortlist for this year's Paul Foot Award in memory of the late, great campaigning investigative journalist Paul Foot.

1:25So let's see which is the first of the stories to be shortlisted for this year's award. Page 94, the Private Eye podcast. Joe Duggan, reporter for the iPaper. Joe, what's the story that's brought you to the Paul Foot Award this year? Since 2024, we've been reporting on cases of silicosis in young workers cutting a stone known as quartz or engineered stone, which is a stone that's become very popular in makeovers for people who are doing their kitchens up. So it's the basic headline seems to be fashionable. Kitchen worktops can actually be leading to serious illness or or even death among the the workers who are who are cutting it.

2:05Yeah. And it's we don't yet know the scale of the problem in this country, but it's the most popular stone for people having kitchens and everyone's got a kitchen. So we know of more than 50 cases so far, but it's likely to be significantly higher than that. somebody i know works in the industry and contacted me and said you know have you heard of this stuff engineered stone quartz you know he was refusing to work with it he said it's too dangerous i don't want to put my workers at risk they've just banned it in australia what's the situation here yeah i'd never heard of it i didn't know what it was i knew what silicosis was it's an occupational lung disease which sort of historically has always been you know people are working like mining construction um have developed silicosis usually after quite a number of years of exposure to dust from cutting stone what we found with the cases of silicosis in the guys who are cutting these kitchen workshops is they were starting to develop it very young and after not very long exposure after you know a couple two or three years in some cases yeah so they were getting ill and and dying younger than historically workers have done when they've contracted silicosis from cutting stone and what what is the substance that you referred to at the top there did you say engineered quartz engineered stone yeah it's also known as quartz and it's become the most popular stone that people have installed in their kitchens when they want a new worktop it's it's cheaper than granite and marble but it looks attractive as well so is it a composite is it yeah it's It's man-made.

3:41It's a man-made stone. So it has a very high level of silica in it. Cutting silica exposes workers who aren't using, who aren't being provided with proper safety protection to dust. And the higher the silica level, the higher the risk to the worker who's cutting it. And in the case of quartz, it can be very high, 95 % silica content. Whereas granite and marble, for example, I think the numbers for either like 30%, much less. can i check this is workers in the uk so how we started to get involved in the story was my friend asked me what's the situation here and i really didn't know where to start so i just looked up all the the top respiratory consultants in the uk who deal with occupational lung disease and just started ringing them up to find out have are there any cases of silicosis here from quartz and eventually that led me to Dr.

4:37Jo Feary who's a doctor at the Royal Brompton Hospital who is the main doctor looking after the UK's first quartz silicosis patient so she told me in January 2024 yes we have started to see the first cases they've developed in the last few months coincidentally about a week after she told me that there was a debate in the House of Lords about this raised by a Green Party peer called Baroness Bennett who's Australian and and she knew about the ban that had just come in Australia and again wanted to know from the government what's the situation here and then government minister said in that debate there are no cases but we we knew that wasn't true it wasn't correct we knew we had a story then and we published the first story I think a week later or so.

5:23So am I right in understanding that there are precautionary measures you can take there are protective masks there are things that you can do to mitigate the risk of um silica and of silicosis the main one is they call it wet cutting which is using water suppressing tools to stop the dust from developing what we found is the profile of the the guys who and it is all all men who are getting it who are getting silicosis they're working for firms who are just not following these safety rules and just leaving them exposed they tend to say as i say they tend to be very very young um a lot of them are migrant workers who are just being exploited basically but what because it's slightly more expensive to use the wet cutting method that makes it a lot safer yeah yeah the firms that they're working for are just cutting cutting corners and not providing their workers with the correct tools so do you know roughly how many people are working in this industry or who might be exposed to this It's been difficult to get sort of figures on it, but there's been a bit of analysis done recently.

6:29And that analysis is estimated there's around 7 ,000 workers working in the industry. We're working on a story based on that analysis at the minute this week. So the latest figures so far are that there are diagnosed 55 workers with silicosis since mid 2023. At least four have died. But the doctors do believe there's probably a significant number more that are out there that haven't been diagnosed yet. So who is meant to be regulating this? The health and safety executive. OK. And I imagine that fairly early on in reporting the story, you ask them about it. I believe that the answer the DWP minister gave at the time came from HSE figures.

7:14So they have recently, in fact, last week, brought in their most significant intervention in this area since this issue developed. They did a couple of years of analysis on the problem. And what they've done is they've issued their first regulatory guidance to specifically address the engineered stone industry, which tells firms dry cutting without what is banned, water suppressing methods, you're legally obliged to use those. We're going to be now undergoing a nationwide inspection campaign of a thousand businesses over the next 12 months. And we're going to basically crack down on firms that aren't doing this.

7:53So it's going to be really interesting over the next few months to see there will be firms getting caught exposing workers to dangerous dust levels. So you'd expect there to be intervention from the HSE. Do you think that's a result of your reporting? Yeah, it is. And I mean, also last week as well, there was another development in this story, which should also really, really help things. There's a new kite mark scheme is being introduced by the industry and by the British Occupational Hygiene Society, which is the Chartered Society for Workplace Protection. What that's going to mean is occupational hygienists are going to inspect firms and ensure that they are wet cutting and ensure there's a whole list of checks that need to be done.

8:42once these independent occupational hygienists have done that they'll be able to mark the slabs with a kite mark to indicate this slab has been cut safely this firm is following the rules i was going to ask the current state of the hse and whether they were able to investigate this before your reporting drew attention to it it sounds like they may not have been i mean silica dust has been a problem for years and they they have been it's not just something that exists in the engineered stone industry so that so they do have been carrying out inspections i mean i i i think it's fair to say that our reporting has pushed along some of the some of the interventions that we're seeing now so so yeah i think i think that's fair i think it'd be interesting to to hear a couple of examples of the the people the the men who've been affected who've been doing this work can you tell me about marrick yeah so marrick we were um in touch with marrick's lawyers they they said to us that he's dying um he was he is he was a polish a polish worker dad of two um 48 years old he was diagnosed i think in april 2024 with silicosis we interviewed him while he was very very sick in the whittington hospital in october 2024 he very bravely wanted to speak out he had only days to live it was quite harrowing interview but he wanted to speak out and he wanted to warn people of the dangers of cutting engineered stone without dust.

10:09So we spoke to him while he was in hospital and he died a few weeks later. So that was a very harrowing interview. A couple of months before that, we'd also interviewed another young man in hospital, a 31-year-old Syrian refugee called Malik. He also had been told by the doctors that he could die. So he again wanted to speak to us and just warn people about the risk that they're running if they work at firms who are cutting corners and exposing them to dust. So, I mean, that's just two of the more than 50 men that I'm known about so far who have this. Merrick was 48 when he passed away. I know that there are some compensation schemes available, but it sounds like the compensation is not getting to people in time and obviously some of the workers who've who've contracted silicosis have then died so yeah i mean that's an insult to injury he was trying his lawyers on behalf of him were pushing for him to get um industrial injuries disability benefit which then once you've been approved for that you can there's a government compensation scheme that you can apply for if if you are the victim of an occupational disease like that it took months of back and forth with the DWP to get anywhere with that in fact at one point he was asked in for an assessment you know when he was lying in a hospital bed dying he was approved on the day he died so you know he didn't you know the money never came his way so it just sort of adds to the whole trauma of what some of these guys are doing i know dr joe fury one of the doctors the main doctor looking after these guys has said that she's been constantly writing letters on behalf of men who are too sick to work and it was really struggling to access the benefits that they are entitled to have the firms where marik or malik were working or any of the other firms where where the workers there have got silicosis have they faced any sanction have they been fined prosecuted there's a criminal investigate the met police are leading the investigation at the minute into maric's death so that's currently the subject of an inquest which resumes again in july there's a civil case attached to that so i think that will sort of resume once the inquest is over and the police are still conducting their inquiries on there so that there are ramifications for for companies who do break break these rules you know you you can face up the two years in prison for breaching health and safety law and you know if the police get involved as well you could be looking at issues like corporate manslaughter so yeah there are there are serious penalties for for people individuals who do put these guys at risk yeah it sounds like the story has a way to go yet i was going to ask what what comes next it sounds like you know potential criminal investigations and of course finding out what happens with these regulations and what kind of teeth they've got.

13:17Yeah, and also one aspect that was key in Australia to sort of really uncovering how bad their problem was was they had a targeted screening program of the workforce, which, you know, they actively went out and sought, because it can be quite hard to find some of these guys because they work in this sort of shadow economy. But they made a real effort in Australia to go out and find people and that exposed how many hundreds of cases there were. I think there's been over a thousand now in the last eight years. I think it was about a quarter of the workforce ended up having silicosis. So something like that here, the analysis we're looking at this week indicates that that would be of significant benefit as well to finding out how many people have it, which has a few benefits for the people concerned.

14:09It means that they can know they've got silicosis and they can stop being exposed to the dust, which means that they are less at risk of developing accelerated or acute silicosis, which is when the disease progressed even worse. It can also allow the authorities to know what firms these guys are getting silicosis in and sort of clamp down on them. Well, it's a terrific story. Thank you so much for telling us all about it. So that's it for today's shortlist eat. We'll be back with another one tomorrow. We'll see you then. Hey, it's your ceiling vent. so I'm dripping. Could be the rain, could be the upstairs bathroom.

14:47Yikes. You could hire the guy your neighbor recommended, but I'm pretty sure that's just his cousin. Do we know if he's licensed or does he just own a ladder? Listen to your home. Go with Thumbtack. Upload a photo or voice note and we'll diagnose your project and match you with the right pro for the job. Thumbtack. We know homes. Hire the right pro today. Andy and Anna here from your new favourite podcast, No Such Thing As A Fish. Yes, we are two of the four hosts of the podcast that stuffs fascinating, amazing, weird, mad facts into your ears on a weekly basis. You got any good facts, Andy? Yes, how about this one?

15:28Anteaters have evolved on 12 separate occasions. Wow. Mysterious, wonderful. The world really wants them to exist. What about this one? When Ronald Reagan left office, he left a note on the White House lawn for the squirrels, warning them to beware of George Bush's dogs. So there you go. If you like fascinating facts and much more besides, we are No Such Thing As A Fish.