Mesothelioma deaths by area: Britain’s asbestos legacy

We extracted all 350 unitary and local authority areas in HSE’s July 2026 MESOAREA workbook. County totals and regional totals are excluded from the local comparison to avoid double-counting. The 350 local totals reconcile to 63,320 male and 11,831 female deaths for 1981–2024.

Expected deaths use Great Britain’s age-specific mortality rates. We use HSE’s published SMRs and confidence intervals unchanged, rather than constructing crude per-person rates. Men and women are assessed separately. An SMR of 200 represents twice the expected deaths under the relevant national benchmark, not a 200% personal probability of illness.

Rank eligibility: at least 20 deaths for the selected sex over 1981–2024. This editorial threshold reduces instability in the headline lists. It leaves 346 male and 243 female areas eligible. All 350 areas remain in the data; unranked areas are grey on the map. Our ranks within the eligible set can differ from HSE’s unfiltered ranks.

Uncertainty: the full-period intervals are HSE’s 95% confidence intervals. “Above GB” means the lower limit exceeds 100; “Below GB” means the upper limit is below 100; otherwise the interval includes 100. These are individual comparisons, without adjustment for testing many areas. The ordering of overlapping estimates should not be treated as a statistically proven difference between councils.

Trends: the local explorer uses the eight five-year periods supplied in tables 03–04, from 1985–1989 to 2020–2024. The headline period starts in 1981; summing the displayed five-year periods therefore does not reproduce its total. Recent-period ratios are shown descriptively, with small counts flagged. We do not treat a change in ratio as a change in absolute risk or claim that it is statistically significant.

Coverage: Great Britain includes England, Scotland and Wales. Northern Ireland is outside the HSE mortality dataset used here, so the map is not labelled as UK-wide. HSE’s harmonised council codes match all 350 Great Britain boundaries in the May 2024 ONS map. Residence at death may differ from place of exposure. Figures for 2024 are provisional.

This is a local exploration of published official statistics, not a new estimate of the amount of asbestos in buildings. For the broader national picture, see our UK asbestos statistics.

Recent-period comparison: the same minimum of 20 deaths is applied separately to 2020–2024, giving 198 eligible male and seven eligible female areas. These ranks use the recent ratios from HSE tables 03–04. Recent-period confidence intervals are not supplied in those trend tables, so no significance comparison is made. The explorer marks those intervals as unavailable; the full-period intervals are not reused for the recent period.