ABSTRACT
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.
