Bereaved Families Win Full Asbestos Compensation From Today
From today, families of people who died of asbestos-related disease before they could claim will receive the same compensation the sufferer would have been entitled to, ending a gap of roughly £7,000. About 300 families a year are affected. For a claimant of sixty, a dependant could now receive £56,656 rather than £24,526.
This is a small, old and precise injustice being closed, and it took decades of campaigning. Under the scheme covering mesothelioma and other dust-related diseases, workers who claimed in their own lifetime received an average of about £17,700 last year; where the sufferer died before claiming, the bereaved family received about £10,700 instead. The logic of the gap was never defensible to the families on the receiving end of it, and the minister for social security put it plainly: “Losing a loved one to an asbestos-related disease is devastating. Families should not then face a financial penalty because of that loss.” The disparity mattered most for younger claimants, which is why the worked example is so stark — more than double for a sixty-year-old’s dependant. The context is that these diseases have long latency, so claims arriving now trace back to exposures decades old, and the number of people still developing mesothelioma from industrial-era asbestos has not yet peaked in every cohort. The change takes effect today rather than at the start of a tax year.