Asbestos Campaign Ruling Ludicrous
A leading lawyer in asbestos diseases today criticised the Advertising Standards Authority‘s decision to uphold a complaint against the Health and Safety Executive’s asbestos awareness campaign, calling the move ‘ludicrous’.
Martin Bare, a leading personal injury lawyer and former President of a major national lawyers association, condemned the decision, saying “It seems ludicrous that the ASA uphold this complaint on a technicality when no one disputes that asbestos is the biggest industrial killer ever. It was a noted industrial killer in Roman times when Pliny wrote of how sickness followed the asbestos mine slaves, who died young.”
Bare paid tribute to the campaign’s contribution to asbestos awareness, saying “It’s probably the most successful HSE information campaign that I can recall, and served the enormously worthwhile cause of alerting people to the continued dangers of asbestos.
“It’s not correct to call asbestos yesterday’s problem, because best estimates are that in the UK today there are still some 800,000 non-domestic premises containing asbestos, including school buildings. People continue to die from asbestos exposure, and to seek to gain some sort of advantage from a technicality is both absurd and offensive.
“ASA seem impotent in their control of adverts for claims farmers, yet seem quite happy to cause significant damage to one of the best public health campaigns the HSE has run in my lifetime,” said Bare.
Martin Bare is a leading solicitor in personal injury law, a Fellow of the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers and a specialist on The Times Law Panel.
Both the Trades Union Congress and HSE had separately commented on ASA\’s decision earlier today.
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