Thanks for your response (podmaster and hacker). Sorry, I wasn't very careful proof-reading my code examples. I meant to use  <b> val1 </b> for the HTML example (and I constantly mispell the word labels, use strict; preserves my sanity when consulting the interpreter.)

I tried to use $query->autoEscape(0) to instruct the CGI.pm module not to change the HTML codes in the labels hash, but it did not work. After a bit of investigating I discovered the web server I'm using, has CGI.pm v3.01 and apparently the autoescape function has been disabled in this version. I downloaded a copy of CGI.pm v2.81 from CPAN and modified the @INC array (at the beginning of my script) to pick up the older version. Now I'm getting the results I expect.

thanks again for your help