§ Mr. Norman Hoggasked the Secretary of State for Employment, pursuant to the answer given to the hon. Member for Dunbartonshire, East on 12 July, if he will give the reasons why the Health and Safety Executive has no plans to publish a full list of known and highly suspect cancer agents based on human experience and animal experimentation, having regard to its published statement in December 1977 that there was a growing list of substances and processes to which varying degrees of suspicion of causing cancer were attached.
§ Mr. MayhewI am advised by the chairman of the Health and Safety Commission that various lists of substances suspected of causing cancer in animals or man have already been published. A very extensive list covering several thousands of chemicals for which there is any evidence at all of carcinogenic activity in animals has been published by the National Insurance of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) in the United States.
In Great Britain, the Health and Safety Executive has already published a short list of 40 chemicals and processes which have been proved to cause, or are highly suspect of causing, cancer in man or 336W animals in its Guidance Note EH 15/73, "Threshold Limit Values for 1978".
In addition, the Health and Safety Executive is considering, as part of the proposed carcinogenic substances regulations, the inclusion, as schedules to the regulations, of lists of carcinogenic substances to which the regulations would apply.
The Health and Safety Executive considers therefore that no useful purpose would be served by the publication of yet another list similar to or identical with that published in the United States of America and referred to by the hon. Member in his question of 12 July 1979.—[Vol. 970, c. 243.]