Joe Duggan

Yeah, I mean, Marek was, that's insult to injury.

His lawyers on behalf of him were pushing for him to get industrial injuries disability benefit.

Which then, once you've been approved for that, there's a government compensation scheme that you can apply for if you are the victim of an occupational disease like that.

It took months of back and forth with the DWP to get anywhere with that.

In fact, at one point he was asked in for an assessment, you know, when he was lying in a hospital bed dying.

He was approved on the day he died.

So, you know, the money never came his way, so...

It just sort of adds to the whole trauma of what some of these guys are doing.

I know that Dr. Jo Ferry, one of the doctors, the main doctor looking after these guys, has said that she's been constantly writing letters on behalf of men who are too sick to work and who are really struggling to access the benefits that they are entitled to.

There's a criminal investigation.

The Met Police are leading the investigation at the minute into Marek's death.

So that's currently the subject of an inquest, which resumes again in July.

There's a civil case attached to that.

So I think that will sort of resume once the inquest is over.

and the police are still conducting their inquiries on there so that there are ramifications for for companies who do break break these rules you know you you can face up to two years in prison for breaching health and safety law and you know if the police get involved as well you could be looking at issues like corporate manslaughter so yeah there are there are serious penalties for for people individuals who do put these guys at risk yeah

Yeah.

And also one aspect that was key in Australia to sort of really uncovering how bad their problem was, was they had a targeted screening program of the workforce that

Which, you know, they actively went out and sought, because it can be quite hard to find some of these guys because they work in this sort of shadow economy.

But they made a real effort in Australia to go out and find people and that exposed how many hundreds of cases there were.

I think there's been over a thousand now in the last...