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LEV testing - the health cost
A general occupational health claim is expensive. A lung disease claim is a category of its own - because the damage is permanent, the diagnosis arrives years after the exposure, and the paper trail leads straight back to whether your extraction was ever tested.
The short answer
Occupational lung diseases - silicosis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, occupational asthma and others - develop slowly from breathing dust, fume or vapour that extraction should have captured. By the time one is diagnosed the damage is usually permanent, the claim spans years of exposure, and the central question is whether the LEV controlling that exposure was ever tested and working. A tested extraction programme is a small cost set against what a defended lung disease claim carries.
Why lung disease is different
Most workplace injuries announce themselves - a cut, a fall, a burn. Occupational lung disease does the opposite. Silica dust scars the lung over years before breathlessness appears. Isocyanate and flour sensitise the airways quietly until an asthma attack makes it obvious. Wood dust and welding fume work on the same slow timescale. The worker feels fine through the years of exposure that cause the harm, and only later does the disease surface - by which point it is usually irreversible.
That latency is what makes lung disease claims so serious. There is no early warning that lets a business correct course before harm is done, and no treatment that undoes the damage once it appears. The exposure that matters happened in the past, and the only thing that stood between the worker and it was the extraction meant to capture the dust or fume at source. Whether that extraction worked - and whether anyone checked - is the whole case.
What the diseases are
The named diseases matter because several are legally recognised as caused by work. Silicosis comes from respirable crystalline silica in stone, concrete and quartz dust and scars the lung permanently. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease can be driven by long-term exposure to dust and fume. Occupational asthma - most commonly in the UK from isocyanate paints, flour and wood dust - can end a career, because once sensitised a worker often cannot return to any exposure at all.
Wood dust and some hardwoods are also linked to sino-nasal cancer, and welding fume is now treated as a carcinogen. These are not vague complaints - they are specific, diagnosable conditions with known causes, several recognised as prescribed industrial diseases. That recognition is exactly what makes them straightforward to bring as a claim: the link between the exposure and the disease is medically established, so the argument moves quickly to whether the employer controlled the exposure.
What a claim costs
A lung disease claim is not one cost but several. There is the compensation itself, which for a permanent, career-ending condition can be substantial. There are the legal costs of defending it, which run whether the claim succeeds or not. There is the time - years, in some cases - during which the business is dealing with the claim rather than trading. And where a regulator becomes involved, there is the enforcement exposure that sits alongside the civil claim, with its own costs recovered from the business.
Then there is the part that never appears on an invoice: the reputational damage of being the employer who gave a worker a permanent lung condition, and the effect on everyone still working there. Set the whole of that against the cost of testing the LEV that should have prevented it, and the comparison is stark. Regular LEV testing is a routine, budgetable, modest cost. A defended lung disease claim is none of those things.
Where the evidence points
When a lung disease claim is brought, the question the business has to answer is simple: did you control the exposure, and can you prove it? The law expects exposure to dust, fume and vapour to be controlled at source by extraction, and it expects that extraction to be examined and tested at least every fourteen months. The record of those tests is the evidence that the control was real and maintained - not just installed once and assumed to work ever after.
A business that can produce a run of LEV test reports showing the extraction was checked and performing is in a defensible position. A business that installed extraction and never tested it - or cannot find the reports - is not, because it cannot show the control was actually working across the years the exposure occurred. In a claim about slow, cumulative harm, that continuous evidence of control is precisely what decides which side the case falls on.
The takeaway
The honest way to think about occupational lung disease is as the most expensive thing that can go wrong with uncontrolled exposure, and the hardest to fix after the fact. The damage is permanent, the claims are strong because the disease-exposure link is medically established, and the defence rests on evidence that only exists if the extraction was tested on a proper cycle all along.
That is why LEV testing is best seen not as a compliance chore but as the cheap side of a very expensive risk. A tested extraction system protects workers from the exposure that causes these diseases in the first place, and gives the business the evidence it needs if a claim is ever brought. The cost of the testing is known and small. The cost of a lung disease claim, once one lands, is neither.
Questions
A group of lung conditions caused by breathing workplace dust, fume or vapour - including silicosis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and occupational asthma. They develop slowly and the damage is usually permanent by the time they are diagnosed.
Because the harm is permanent and the disease-exposure link is medically established for several of them. That makes the claim strong, and moves the argument straight to whether the employer controlled the exposure - which is what the LEV evidence shows.
More than the compensation alone. There are the legal costs of defending it, the years it can take to resolve, any enforcement exposure alongside it, and reputational damage - none of which appear on a single invoice.
It produces dated evidence that the extraction controlling the exposure was examined and performing across the period in question. A business that can show a continuous run of test reports can demonstrate the control was real and maintained.
In the UK the most common causes include isocyanate paints, flour and wood dust. Once a worker is sensitised they often cannot return to any exposure, which can end a career - part of why these claims are so costly.
Yes. LEV testing is a routine, budgetable cost on a set cycle. A defended lung disease claim - compensation, legal costs, lost time, reputation - is open-ended and lands all at once. The testing is the cheap side.
We test your extraction on the cycle the law expects and give you the dated reports that prove the exposure was controlled - before any claim is ever raised.
