It is a privilege, Mr President, to be invited to lecture to your Institute, especially in commemoration of Alfred Watson who did so much to establish the firm foundations of your profession. These are of such detail and intricacy that you remain elite and hardly subject to the kind of challenges which more and more affect other professions. Perhaps your time will come as mutterings are heard about your valuations of pension funds and to whom they belong.

The subject of this lecture tonight is the way in which risk has forced itself to the front of public discussion and finds the expression in comment almost every day, whether on the issue of vaccine damage to children, medical negligence, the Chernobyl disaster, landslides in Colombia or floods in Bangladesh.