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TBA Industrial Products produces asbestos textiles for brake linings. The company is just instituting a programme to reduce the asbestos in the air at the plant to a maximum 0.5 fibres per millilitre of air - the control limit imposed by the Health and Safety Executive responsible. With constant exposure to that level, according to a report by an Ontario Royal Commission, between one and four out of 100 people working for 25 years could expect to die of an asbestos-related cancer. Yet David Gee, health and safety officer of the General, Municipal and Boilermakers Union, accepts that the company should go no lower. Why? Problem number one is assessing the risk and the difference that proposed safety measures would make to it. There are three basic categories, to which the HSE's policy-makers work - in the jargon, corpses, cancers and catastrophes. "Corpses" are the victims of one-off accidents. A wealth of evidence on such accidents exists, and the effects of measures to combat them are easily calculated. "Cancers", the killer diseases that can arise from working long periods in unsafe environments, are harder to assess. The diseases may not appear until years after the process was first initiated, and the relationship between cause and effect is often controversial. Assessing the potential for "catastrophes" - like Bhopal, Seveso or Flix-borough - in which tens of thousands of people can be affected is harder still. Such events are exceedingly rare so they cannot be predicted on the basis of past experience. Instead engineering experts think of everything that could go wrong - and of the things that could go wrong with the precautions. The probability of an accident is then expressed in terms of the number of likely catastrophes per 10,000 years, usually a fraction of one. This process yields an estimate of the risk of loss of life for each plant or process. The next stage is to put a money value on it. The classic economist's calculation uses what is called the "human capital" approach. The dead person is valued as a machine who would otherwise have produced goods. This callous calculus made no allowance for what most people would regard as the main cost of a lost life - the pain, grief and suffering. That has now changed, thanks to work by Professor Michael Jones-Lee and colleagues at Newcastle University. They asked members of the public what risks they would be prepared to run for what overall rewards. This process yields estimates of the subjective value of lives. The answer seems to come out between £1m and £2m.

Questions 1-5

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