HC Deb 04 March 2003 vol 400 cc929-30W
Mr. Beggs

To ask the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland if he will make a statement on the latest available scientific research on the safety of mobile phone masts. [89402]

Mr. Browne

The Independent Expert Group on Mobile Phones (IEGMP), chaired by Sir William Stewart, published a report on the subject of mobile phone technology in May 2000. The Group examined the health implications of this technology and carried out an assessment of existing research. It concluded that the balance of evidence indicated that there was no general risk to the health of people living near to base stations on the basis that exposures were expected to be small fractions of the guidelines.

Recognising, however, that there were gaps in knowledge, the Expert Group recommended further research and as a result a joint government/industry research project, to which my Department is contributing £30,000 over three years, was announced in 2001. The Mobile Telecommunications and Health Research (MTHR) Programme invites research applications both in relation to masts and to mobile phone handsets. Research on the group of projects funded under the first call is now well under way. The names of the projects selected from the second call are

Mr. Pearson

Information on redundancies is currently only available at either Job Centre Area level or for Northern Ireland as a whole. The Newtownards Job Centre is the only job centre located within Strangford parliamentary constituency (PC). There have been a total of 927 redundancies since 1997 (the earliest year for which disaggregated information is available) in the manufacturing industry. Information on redundancies by sub-sector within manufacturing by year since 1997 is provided in Table 1.

Over the last five years, the Invest NI legacy organisations (Industrial Development Board, Local Enterprise Development Unit and Industrial Research and Technology Unit specifically) offered assistance of £11.56 million to companies in the manufacturing sector within the Strangford constituency. Details of the assistance offered is set out in Table 2.

expected to be announced in due course and an advert for a third call appeared in appropriate publications in week commencing 16 December.