§ Earl Russellasked Her Majesty's Government:
Further to the statement by the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Social Security on 3 March (HC Deb, col. 1044) that "Fifty decibels is 181WA the point at which a person starts to have trouble following conversation in a noisy environment", whether they will indicate what scientific and medical evidence there is to justify this statement. [HL2743]
§ The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Social Security (Baroness Hollis of Heigham)The effect on hearing ability of any level of hearing loss varies among individuals depending on age, gender, type of hearing loss and whether hearing ability is measured by self-report or actual inability to perform listening tasks. The comment by my honourable friend the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Social Security (Mr. Bayley) was intended to give a non-specialist audience an idea of the impact of such a hearing loss in an adult.
A number of scales linking disablement to hearing level have been proposed and most publicly funded compensation schemes define a disablement threshold level below which disablement does not attract compensation. In the industrial injuries and war pensions schemes the compensation threshold is set at 50 decibels averaged over 1, 2 and 3 Kiloherz, which equates to 20 per cent. disablement in the scale of disablement used for both schemes. The details of the adoption of this threshold are set out in the Industrial Injuries Command Paper, Command 5461, Occupational Deafness (October 1973). A copy of that paper will be sent to the noble Earl.