A new Asbestos: Australia Acted. Will Britain?

In July 2024, Australia did something no country had done before. It banned engineered stone outright, the manufacture, supply, and installation of the quartz worktops sitting in kitchens the world over. Six months later, it extended that ban to imports. For a material that homeowners loved and retailers happily stocked, it was an extraordinary step.

Governments do not usually remove a popular, profitable consumer product from the market altogether. They tinker, they regulate, they issue guidance. Australia did none of those half-measures. It looked at the evidence, decided the product could not be made safe, and took it off the table.

And it should be a rallying cry for the UK.

What happened in Australia

The Australian story is not one of a government acting on a hunch. It is one of evidence becoming impossible to ignore and action being taken to stem harm to the workers of today and tomorrow.

Since the first engineered-stone silicosis case was identified there in 2015, hundreds more followed. What alarmed clinicians was not just the number but the pattern: the workers falling ill were overwhelmingly young, many under 35, and the disease was moving with frightening speed, robbing fit men in their twenties and thirties of their lungs and, in some cases, their lives. This was not the slow, decades-long illness the medical textbooks described; the kind that surfaced in quarrymen and miners late in life. This was something faster and crueller, striking people at the start of their careers and leaving some of them waiting for lung transplants before they had reached forty. Doctors began calling it "the asbestos of the 2020s."

That comparison was not made lightly. Asbestos is the reference point every occupational health professional reaches for when a familiar and widely used material turns out to be quietly lethal; and when the harm it causes is irreversible, preventable, and decades in the making.

To put engineered stone in the same sentence was to say, in effect, that we risked repeating one of the gravest occupational health failures of the last century; only this time we had our eyes open.

Faced with that warning, Safe Work Australia, the national policy body, was asked to investigate whether the material could be made safe, perhaps by limiting its silica content. This was the reasonable middle path, the option that would have let the industry continue with tighter rules. Its conclusion was stark: there is no safe level. Even wet cutting and ventilation, it found, did not reliably bring exposure down far enough. The only dependable way to protect workers was to remove the product altogether. The compromise everyone hoped for simply did not exist in the evidence.

The campaign that made it happen

The ban did not come from nowhere. It was fought for and it was won.

That distinction matters, because it is easy to look at a landmark piece of policy and assume it was the inevitable result of the science. It was not. Plenty of dangerous things remain legal long after the evidence against them becomes clear. What turned the evidence into action was organised, sustained pressure.

Unions, doctors, public health bodies, and injured workers built a coordinated campaign, fronted by the construction union's blunt "Stop this killer stone" message. They did not simply lobby quietly. The construction union set a deadline, warning that if government had not acted by mid-2024, its members would refuse to touch the product on sites across the country. That threat carried real weight, because it meant the industry faced disruption whether or not ministers moved. Major retailers including IKEA and Bunnings moved first, announcing they would phase the material out, a commercial signal that the product's days were numbered even before the law caught up. Medical researchers and cancer charities lined up behind a full prohibition, ensuring that the campaign could not be dismissed as the work of any single interest group.

The decisive ingredient was the workers themselves, men and women who had already developed silicosis were willing to tell their stories. There is no statistic, however alarming, that lands the way a young fabricator describing his shrinking lung capacity does, or a family talking about a diagnosis that has stolen their shared future. Their testimony turned an abstract risk into a human one, and it gave politicians the moral case they needed to act. When federal and state ministers signed off the ban in December 2023, they were responding to a movement, not just a report.

Why this should matter to the UK

The UK is now where Australia was a few years ago, watching the early cases appear and deciding what to do about them. The crucial word is early. We are at the point on the curve where decisions made now will determine how steep the climb becomes.

The first British engineered-stone silicosis cases were referred to specialists in mid-2023, when a cluster of young men were seen at the Royal Brompton Hospital in London, their average age just 34, some with only a few years of exposure behind them. Since then, more than 50 cases have been confirmed, with at least four deaths, including young workers who came to the UK to build a better life. The pattern is the same one Australia saw: young men, rapid disease, irreversible damage.

We are not facing a different problem and hoping for a different outcome; we are watching the same problem begin, a few years behind.

There is one important difference worth being honest about. Britain has identified only a fraction of the cases other countries have, and that is not necessarily reassuring. Silicosis is not a notifiable disease here, which means there is no systematic way of counting it, and the long latency of the natural-stone form means earlier cases may simply never have been linked back to the dust that caused them. Engineered stone is a large and growing industry in the UK, home to part of Europe's manufacturing base. The likeliest explanation for the small number of confirmed cases is not that the problem is small, but that we have barely begun to look.

The UK has chosen a different path.

In May 2026, the Health and Safety Executive published its first guidance specific to engineered stone, declaring dry cutting unacceptable, requiring water suppression, low-silica materials, respiratory protection, and health surveillance, and backing it with more than 1,000 inspections. This is welcome and overdue. The HSE's own research found that dry fabrication produces silica exposure five to ten times higher than wet methods, and that lower-silica materials of equivalent quality are readily available, so there is no good reason for businesses not to switch. Inspectors visiting more than a thousand sites is a serious commitment, and it will save lives. None of that should be dismissed.

But the government has been explicit that an outright ban is "not the right approach" for now, promising only to keep Australia's experience "under review."

is the gap. Enforcement of good controls is essential, but Safe Work Australia's central finding was that controls alone were not enough to make this material safe. Relying on every fabricator, in every small workshop, to apply wet cutting perfectly, every time, is a heavy bet to place on workers' lungs. It assumes that water suppression is never switched off to see the cut line, that extraction is always maintained, that masks always fit, and that the smallest, least-resourced operators are as diligent as the industry leaders. The Australian evidence suggests that even when controls are applied properly, exposure can still run too high. When the consequence of a lapse is an incurable disease in a worker's twenties, the margin for error is the wrong thing to be relying on.

And while this may be the end goal, an outright ban, we appreciate that political and public will needs to support our case. In the meantime, a suite of control measures are the only tools available to protect workers. Our calls to ban the dry cutting of stone and to introduce competent person sign-off for high-risk projects are evidence-backed good practice; serving as a stepping stone while the public and politicians catch up.

The lesson worth learning

Australia did not act early. It acted only after hundreds of its workers were already sick. That is the part of the Australian story we should sit with most uncomfortably, because it is also the part we still have the chance to avoid. The UK still has the chance to do what Australia could not: get ahead of the wave before the diagnoses pile up. The cases surfacing now are the leading edge, not the peak, and the exposures happening in workshops today will become the illnesses of the 2030s and 2040s. The cost of waiting is not measured in months of delayed policy; it is measured in lungs and lives.

The campaign that delivered Australia's ban shows what it takes, a coalition of workers, clinicians, unions, and safety bodies refusing to accept that a fashionable kitchen finish is worth a young person's life. That coalition can exist here too. The clinicians are already speaking out. The case for change is already being made in Parliament. What is needed now is for that pressure to become as organised, as loud, and as united as the campaign that carried the day in Australia.

British Safety Council is calling on government to ban the dry cutting of stone without control measures and to require competent person sign-off on high-risk work, the firm floor beneath which no worker should be asked to operate. These are not radical asks, and they are not the end of the conversation; they are the minimum a responsible system should guarantee while the wider question of the product itself remains under review. Australia has shown that bold action is possible when the evidence is clear.

Here, the evidence is already in. What remains is the will to act on it.