A retired Merseyside dock worker who suffers from an asbestos-related illness has succeeded in the High Court with a decision allowing him to sue the Government for compensation.

Robert Thompson, 65, of Scarisbrick, near Southport, won the right to take legal action along with docker's widow Winifred Rice, of Ormskirk, Lancashire.

As reported in the BBC's News Website, the court apparently ruled that the Department of Trade and Industry was responsible for dockers' safety in the 1950s and 1960s. But, interestingly, the DTI were also granted leave to appeal.

Employment on a casual basis under the National Dock Labour Board scheme, set up by the Government in the late 1940s to organise labour arrangements at ports, continued until 1967.

This gave lawyers acting for the DTI, which now has responsibility for the former dock labour boards, an argument that the boards were not employers, but simply hired and arranged labour for shipping and stevedoring companies.

Many dockers unloaded raw asbestos from ships.

"The dock labour board put us in a pen like cattle, we were picked out and sent to unload the asbestos from the ships in the docks," said Mr Thompson.

"If we refused to go on the ships we were sacked. The asbestos was floating around everywhere. The dock labour board must have known they were sending us into danger."

Mrs Rice, whose husband Edward died of asbestos cancer mesothelioma in 2000, added: "The last thing Edward said before he died was that I had to go on with his case.

"It's so important that someone takes responsibility for what happened to him - the illness changed him from a healthy 15-stone man to a six-stone shadow of himself.

Source: BBC News Website