Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what plans her Department has to record the effect of occupational hearing loss nationally.
The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) has no plans to record the effect of occupational hearing loss nationally.
HSE publishes information recorded by other agencies about occupational hearing loss in relation to Industrial Injuries Disablement Benefit (IIDB) and the Labour Force Survey, available from the statistics section of HSE’s website (https://www.hse.gov.uk/statistics/causdis/deafness/index.htm and https://www.hse.gov.uk/noise/statistics.htm).
HSE also sponsors the THOR-GP project, a programme of research into the wider incidence of occupational disease being undertaken at the University of Manchester, which includes occupational hearing loss (http://research.bmh.manchester.ac.uk/epidemiology/COEH/research/thorgp/).