The BBC falls for the Asbestos Scam - by Christopher Booker

Imagine that a very experienced, knowledgeable and brave whistleblower sets out to expose a commercial racket that is ripping off businesses and members of the public to the tune of hundreds of millions of pounds a year, and which a government agency, despite being supplied with factual evidence, does nothing to stop. If a leading BBC "consumer affairs" programme learned about this story, might one not expect it to throw all its resources into exposing the racket?

It might seem odd that, using evidence supplied by the very people who are behind the scam, the BBC would instead pull out all the stops to discredit the whistleblower. Yet such is the bizarre situation that will arise this Wednesday, when Radio Four's You and Yours programme attempts to sabotage the four-year campaign waged by Prof John Bridle, Britain's leading practical asbestos expert, to expose the malpractices of many firms in the asbestos industry. This column has supported Bridle's crusade since 2002, when the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) proposed new asbestos regulations that, on its own original figures, would cost £8 billion. Introduced to me by the Federation of Small Businesses, Bridle explained how these regulations were so seriously flawed that they would open the door to shameless exploitation by many of the firms to which the HSE gave the exclusive right to handle asbestos.

When I checked this out with some of the leading asbestos scientists in this country, they not only endorsed what he was saying but said they were enthusiastically behind his campaign. Such support did it win from members of the public, not least readers of this column, that Bridle set up Asbestos Watchdog, a company dedicated to giving honest advice to the ever larger number of people who were victims of the racket.

So powerful was Bridle's case that Asbestos Watchdog was given the HSE's official support, and on November 26 2004 was appointed by Bill Macdonald, the HSE's head of asbestos policy, as an official "stakeholder" to advise on policy. One leading asbestos company was so alarmed by the practices rife in the industry that it even gave Asbestos Watchdog significant financial backing.

But so vast were the sums now at stake that there have recently been clear signs of a concerted move by the powerful "anti-asbestos lobby" to silence Bridle. One of their greatest successes to date has been winning the support of the You and Yours team. Fortunately, the programme has informed him of 18 of the charges they plan to throw at him, all of which have been levelled before by different branches of the anti-asbestos lobby. It is hard to believe that the BBC will be so reckless as to repeat them (when he offered documentary evidence to refute their charges, one journalist said they were so confident they were right that this was not necessary).

Some charges are laughable, such as that Bridle falsely claims to have been made in 2005 an honorary professor of the prestigious Russian Academy of Medical Sciences. Confirmed by the academy's official certificate, this was widely reported in Russia at the time as the first occasion on which anyone had been so honoured.

The BBC charges him with falsely claiming to have advised the Conservative Party leadership.

Yet in 2002 when, after a briefing from Bridle, Iain Duncan Smith, then the party's leader, wrote to the Government asking for the regulations to be delayed until they could be debated by Parliament, Bridle (and I) gave extensive written and verbal briefings to John Bercow, the front-bench Tory spokesman who led the debate, as You and Yours could have confirmed by consulting Hansard.

The BBC denies that Asbestos Watchdog, much to the rage of the asbestos industry, has saved businesses and homeowners tens of millions of pounds by advising how asbestos work could legally and safely be carried out for a fraction of the sums they had been quoted by contractors, as I have reported here (not least because many of the beneficiaries were readers of The Sunday Telegraph). The BBC did not even want to look at the evidence.

The central point on which the whole asbestos scam rests, as You and Yours seems unable to grasp, is the confusion, now made worse by some very bad law, between two completely different minerals, both passing under the general but unscientific term "asbestos".

One includes the genuinely dangerous blue and brown forms (amphiboles with sharp metallic fibres that, remaining in the lungs, can cause cancer). The other, very much commoner, "white asbestos" (chrysotile, the soft silky fibres of which dissolve in the lungs within 15 days) is usually encapsulated in cement or textured coatings, from which it is virtually impossible to extract a single fibre.

Yet it is on the sleight of hand allowing the dangers of one mineral to be attributed to the other that huge sums of money are now being made by those who play on public fear and ignorance, a commercial racket the HSE does nothing to stop.

Itself a victim of this confusion, the BBC seems desperate to pin on Bridle the damning charge that he claims that "white asbestos is harmless". Yet he is always scrupulously careful to cite the most comprehensive review yet conducted of the scientific literature (Hoskins and Lange 2004) as showing that white cement products pose "no measurable risk to health".

Instead of falling for such distortions and untruths, the BBC team should be asking why they plan to give credence to the most disgraceful commercial racket flourishing in Britain today.