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 eye paper.

Joe, what's the story that's brought you to the Paul Foot 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 it's the the basic headline seems to be fashionable

kitchen work tops can actually be leading to serious illness or or even death among the the workers

who are who are cutting it. Yeah. And it's 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. They don't want to put my workers at risk. They've just banned it in Australia. What's the situation here? Yeah. 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 just like mining, construction, 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, they were starting to develop it very young and after not very long exposure,

a couple, two or three years in some cases.

So they were getting ill and dying younger than historically workers have them when they've contracted silicosis

from cutting stone.

And what is the substance that you referred to at the top there?

Did you say engineered quartz?

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