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The Interdepartmental Liaison Group on Risk Assessment (ILGRA) was established in 1991 on the initiative of the Health and Safety Executive, the regulatory body for most industrial risks in the UK. Risk is a prime example of an issue that pervades policies across government and for which there is a recognised need for integration of policy-making. The ILGRA network in liaison mode was characteristically weak in terms of the interdependencies between the participants. The trigger for the transformation of the ILGRA network from liaison to interdependency came fortuitously. A commitment was given in the White Paper that an annual Forward Look on Government funded Science, Engineering and Technology (SET) would be published and the first of these described a long-term exercise to be undertaken under the aegis of ILGRA on risk assessment and toxicology. The remaining issue of methodologies concerned the development of a common UK approach to negotiations on risk assessment at international level.

The interaction of man with natural and manmade hazards is subject to many uncertainties. Risk assessment in its general sense is the study of that interaction in order to inform decisions about what should be done in any given context. Advances in risk estimation methodologies have been paralleled by equally important changes in society’s response to risk issues. For a long time, risk was seen as no more than an objective measure of the possibility of identified physical harm and exclusively a matter for expert assessors. Any reluctance to accept the expert view was dismissed as irrational. But several factors have combined to make decision making on risk a fertile and complex subject of debate. These include: growing understanding of the influences that colour people’s perception of risks; heightened awareness of the dependency of expert assessments on judgement; consequent demands for greater openness and inclusion of stakeholder values in framing the issues and arriving at a balanced decision, and incessant media clamour driven by the difficult politics of the equitable distribution of costs and benefits. In threading a way through this minefield, the decision maker can succeed only with expert advice that is robust and tractable to public scrutiny. Various developments relevant to that aim will be discussed.