Too little, too late? The home office and the asbestos industry regulations, 1931

Our plain-English summary of Too little, too late? The home office and the asbestos industry regulations, 1931, by P. Bartrip (Medical History, 1998).

The study

• Author: P. Bartrip
• Journal: Medical History
• Published: 1998;42(4):421-38
• Type of article: Historical article
• Cited by: 8 articles, as counted by NIH iCite
• Read it: PubMed · Publisher · Free full text

Summary of the article

This historical article examined how Britain's Asbestos Industry Regulations, 1931, were made. It questioned a scholarly consensus that regulation arrived late, that manufacturers, medical scientists and Factory Inspectors deserved censure for the delay, and that the rules came from "cosy" negotiations between manufacturers and civil servants that took little account of trade unions. The author drew on Factory Inspectorate annual reports, Home Office and Public Record Office files, Trades Union Congress (TUC) archives and Turner & Newall company papers. The article traced official references to asbestos hazards from the 1898 Lady Inspectors' report onward. It then followed the inquiry Edward Merewether began in 1928, the 1930 Merewether-Price report (including a clinical and radiological survey of 363 workers), and the later conferences with employers and the TUC. The author argued that early references were brief and infrequent, and that there was no compelling evidence or sustained call for regulation until the late 1920s, after which the Inspectorate acted speedily. Employers and organized labour were each able to change the rules only at the margins. Union leaders and Thomas Legge, the TUC's medical adviser, accepted the outcome. The regulations came into effect on 1 March 1932. The author concluded that charges of delay and one-sidedness rested largely on hindsight and "presentist" history. At the time, asbestos was seen as one hazard among several that could be controlled by suppressing dust.

PubMed has no abstract for this study, and the article doesn't print one. We wrote this summary from the full article with the help of AI. It is not the authors' wording.

In plain English

This historical article examined how Britain's Asbestos Industry Regulations, 1931 were made. It collected no new health data. The author traced the first British reference to asbestos health hazards to an 1898 inspectors' report; later references stayed brief and infrequent until the late 1920s. A 1928 report of a Glasgow asbestos worker with pulmonary fibrosis prompted an inquiry, whose clinical part surveyed 363 workers. The Factory Inspectorate consulted manufacturers before the Trades Union Congress. The author found that unions and employers alike changed the rules only at the margins. The regulations took effect on 1 March 1932. Asbestos fatalities recorded by the Factory Inspectorate in 1957 (18) were 100 per cent higher than in 1931, while the tonnage of raw and fibre asbestos imported and retained in the UK was more than 600 per cent greater. The author argued that deaths fell relative to industry size. The author concluded there were no convincing grounds for saying the regulations were established long after asbestos dangers had been appreciated. A full study of their effectiveness lay beyond the article's scope.

We wrote this plain-English summary from the full article with the help of AI, and a second AI model checked each sentence against the article. It is not the authors' wording; the abstract and the article are their own account.

What the study did and found

• Design: historical analysis (history of occupational health regulation), re-examining earlier historians' accounts
• Who was studied: the making of the Asbestos Industry Regulations in Britain: the Factory Inspectorate, asbestos manufacturers and organized labour (trade unions and the TUC), with background from 1898 to the regulations' coming into effect in 1932
• Exposure: asbestos dust in British asbestos factories and workshops, including textile processes such as spinning and carding; no fiber types are named
• Main results:
  • The earliest British reference to asbestos health hazards was in the 1898 annual report of the Lady Inspectors of Factories
  • Early references were brief; Anderson's discussion of asbestos in the 1899 report was less than 6 lines of a 536 page annual report
  • The Merewether part of the Merewether-Price report (not this article) was a clinical and radiological survey of 363 workers exposed to asbestos dust
  • The first conference on dust regulations, on 8 July 1930, involved six Factory Inspectors and seven representatives of asbestos firms; unions were consulted later
  • The author argued that, like the TUC, employers were able to modify the rules only at the periphery
  • The regulations, dated 31 December 1931, came into effect on 1 March 1932 and contained seventeen regulations: twelve imposed obligations on employers and five on workers
  • Asbestos fatalities recorded by the Factory Inspectorate in 1957 (18) were 100 per cent higher than in 1931. The tonnage of raw and fibre asbestos imported and retained in the UK in 1957 was more than 600 per cent greater than in 1931. The author argued that deaths from occupational asbestosis declined relative to the size of the industry.
• The authors' conclusion: The author concluded that there were no convincing grounds for saying the regulations were established long after the dangers of asbestos had been appreciated. The author also saw little evidence that regulators favoured manufacturers over workers, and argued that critics' views owed much to hindsight.
• Limitations the authors state:
  • A full investigation of whether manufacturers complied and whether the regulations improved health was beyond the article's scope
  • The fatality-versus-import comparison depends on which years are compared

Topics

The National Library of Medicine indexes this study under subjects our site covers: Asbestosis.

Medical terms in this study, explained in our Lexicon: Turner & Newall.

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