To ask the Secretary of State for Social Security if he will list, by category, those statistics his Department maintains or has access to with regard to claims for pensions for industrially-induced deafness.
Information is maintained on the numbers of successful claims for occupational deafness and those disallowed either on the occupational criteria or on hearing losses below the prescribed standard.
To ask the Secretary of State for Social Security how many people dropped out of making claims for pensions for noise-induced industrial deafness at the stage where the five-year rule came into effect in (a) St. Helens and (b) the United Kingdom in the last five years for which figures are available.
The available information is as follows. In Great Britain during the five-year period April 1985 to March 1990 a total of 11,742 claimants were disallowed because they had not made a claim within five years of leaving the relevant occupation—the provision intended by regulation 25 of the Industrial Injuries (Prescribed Diseases) Regulations 1985. They were not, therefore, referred for audiometric testing to establish whether they satisfied the necessary level of hearing loss. For St. Helens the relevant figure for the four-year period to March 1990 is 107 claimants. Individual figures for St. Helens are no longer available for periods before April 1986.