175: PAUL FOOT 2026: CUTTING CORNERS
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Hello and welcome to Page 94. My name is Andrew Hunter-Murray and I'm here in the Private Eye offices about to interview the shortlist for this year's Paul Foot Award in memory of the late, great campaigning investigative journalist Paul Foot. So let's see which is the first of the stories to be shortlisted for this year's award.
Page 94, the Private Eye podcast.
Joe Duggan, reporter for the iPaper. Joe, what's the story that's brought you to the Pulford Award this year?
Since 2024, we've been reporting on cases of silicosis in young workers cutting a stone known as quartz or engineered stone, which is a stone that's become very popular in makeovers for people who are doing their kitchens up. So...
The basic headline seems to be fashionable kitchen work tops can actually be leading to serious illness or even death among the workers who are cutting it.
Yeah, and we don't yet know the scale of the problem in this country, but it's the most popular stone for people having kitchens and everyone's got a kitchen. So we know of more than 50 cases so far, but it's likely to be significantly higher than that. Somebody I know works in the industry and contacted me and said, you know, have you heard of this stuff, engineered stone quartz? You know, he was refusing to work with it. He said it's too dangerous. I don't want to put my workers at risk. They've just banned it in Australia. What's the situation here? Yeah.
What is the story behind silicosis in young workers?
I'd never heard of it. I didn't know what it was. I knew what silicosis was. It's an occupational lung disease, which sort of historically has always been, you know, people are working in mining, construction industry. um have developed silicosis usually after quite a number of years of exposure to dust from cutting stone what we found with the cases of silicosis in the guys who were cutting these kitchen workshops is they were starting to develop it very young and after not very long exposure off you know a couple two or three years in some cases yeah So they were getting ill and dying younger than historically workers have done when they've contracted silicosis from cutting stone.
What is the substance that you referred to at the top there? Did you say engineered quartz? Engineered stone, yeah.
It's also known as quartz, and it's become the most popular stone that people have installed in their kitchens when they want a new worktop. It's cheaper than granite and marble, but it looks attractive as well. Is it a composite? Yeah, it's man-made. It's a man-made stone. It has a very high level of silica in it. Cutting silica exposes workers who aren't using who aren't being provided with proper safety protection to dust and the higher the silica level the higher the risk to the worker who's cutting it and in case in the case of quartz it can be very high 95 percent silica content whereas granite and marble for example i think the numbers for either are like 30 percent much less Can I check?
This is workers in the UK.
So how we started to get involved in the story was my friend asked me, what's the situation here? And I really didn't know where to start. So I just looked up all the top respiratory consultants in the UK who deal with occupational lung disease and just started ringing them up to find out, are there any cases of silicosis here? from quartz. And eventually that led me to Dr. Jo Feery, who's a doctor at the Royal Brompton Hospital, who is the main doctor looking after the UK's first quartz silicosis patients. So she told me in January 2024, yes, we have started to see the first cases. They've developed in the last few months.
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