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This page is out of date. Click here to visit our new site. The UK House of Lords Science and Technology Committee report Science and Society published on 23 February 2000 stated:4.4 The questions of how to quantify and communicate risk and uncertainty are currently the subject of intense study. The issues are of increasing concern in government, as government takes on ever more responsibility for regulating risky activities of all kinds, incurring political and sometimes legal liability when things go wrong. The Cabinet Office (May Q 29) and the Royal Society (Cox Q 143) are both active in this area; the Health and Safety Executive chairs the Interdepartmental Liaison Group on Risk Assessment (ILGRA) whose work on communication is commended by the Consumers' Association (Q 642); in the private sector it is a constant challenge for consumer publications such as Which? (Q 603). But no satisfactory solution has been found; and the failure to do so may have hugely expensive public consequences. 4.15 It is considered in some quarters that public discussion of risk would be much easier if there were one simple and widely understood scale on which any given risk could be placed and compared with others. According to SmithKline Beecham, such a scale is "desperately needed" in the United Kingdom (p 412). This concept, which is sometimes referred to as a "Richter Scale of risk", has been under discussion between the Royal Society, the Royal Statistical Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering (Cox QQ 143, 785).
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