§ Mr. Alfred Morrisasked the Secretary of State for Social Services, pursuant to his reply to the right hon. Member for Manchester, Wythenshawe, on 30 October concerning awards of disablement benefit in the last 20 cases of prescribed disease No. 39, if he will provide as full information as possible concerning the awards, and set out the reasons why the full information requested in the original question could not be obtained without disproportionate expense, and what the latter expense would be.
§ Mr. PrenticeInformation relating to the types of cases referred to in the right hon. Gentleman's question is not available centrally and could be obtained only by identifying the PD39 cases examined by medical boards over a lengthy period. This would require the examination of registers of medical boarding held in 12 regional offices. It is estimated that to 475W extract the necessary identification details would require a check of at least one year's entries.
Having identified the PD39 cases in this way, the relevant case papers would need to be extracted from local office files and examined at a central point. Even if examination of one year's entries sufficed, the operation would cost about £500.