Select Committee on Science and Technology Minutes of Evidence



Examination of Witness (Questions 30 - 39)


WEDNESDAY 17 JUNE

SIR ROBERT MAY

  30. In your submission to us you have said that OST is concerned that government departments are adequately equipped to be able to understand and use the scientific advice which they commission. Are they adequately equipped or do you think there is a need for Ministers and their civil servants to become more scientifically literate and if so how would you seek to achieve this?
  (Sir Robert May) Two preambles. First, as a person trained as a theoretical physicist and inculcated with the view that they are the master race, I believe the world would be a better place if everyone were trained as a theoretical physicist. However, recognising that this is an impossible dream, I nevertheless secondarily observe that more members of the civil service and indeed the present parliament have scientific backgrounds than ever before. The number of people with scientific backgrounds in the present parliament is certainly the largest ever in Britain and may well be the largest there has been in any country. A surprising number of permanent secretaries and other members of the civil service have this background. Against that preliminary, I would say I do not think there is a serious problem with people without a scientific background in the civil service being able sensibly to evaluate and handle scientific advice when it has been gathered well in an appropriate way. Most of the things we could think of as anecdotes where things have not gone well stem not so much from people failing to appreciate the advice, as people in the department lacking the underlying strength to recognise the kind of advice they wanted. Here I will go out on a limb and say, although it is completely understandable, it was understandable as the history evolved, for quite some time the Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee, SEAC, did not have on it a geneticist and it did not have on it an expert in the population dynamics of disease. That was a reflection, I believe, of the fact that it had not been fully appreciated just how many people you needed on that committee to cover the huge potential remit of it. Some things followed from that. This is something more the subject of another committee but it illustrates the point that my worry is more that you need to have a cadre of people who know the questions they need to ask. Once they have asked them the interpretation of the answers, while not always easy, is, I believe, not usually a problem.

  31. So each government department ought to have at least a chief scientist, as is suggested under the Fairclough Guidelines. However, you have told us that there are several government department which do not have a designated or ex officio chief scientist. Can you name which government departments do not have and why you think they do not?
  (Sir Robert May) For example, the Department of Trade and Industry, my own department, did have but no longer have, and this had happened before OST moved into it, someone called the chief scientist. It does not now, but seamlessly through those transitions, it has an individual whom I would identify as the person who executes the role of chief scientist in DTI, who sits on the EASO committee and to whom I turn when I turn to DTI, even-handedly as I would to any other government department. Whether they are called chief scientists or not is in most cases a detail. The picture varies across departments. Some of the major departments, defence and health, share with the Office of Science and Technology the fairly unique property. There is a Chief Scientific Adviser in MOD which also goes back to World War Two and for a while, as far as I can make out, was more or less coincident with the Chief Scientist, who is a permanent secretary level appointment, who is a very distinguished outsider, currently Sir David Davies. That someone is deliberately brought in on a fixed term appointment. He is in fact president of the Royal Academy of Engineering. Health has both the Chief Medical Officer and the Director of Research in the National Health Service which brings in on a term appointment an extremely distinguished member of the external community. Other departments will bring in someone as a chief scientist from an open and external search, not always however at a permanent secretary level appointment but a lower grade and correspondingly often a really very able person but not quite of the Fellow of the Royal Society stature which others ask for. In other instances there will be somebody who is a career civil servant and if you ask me to go round the table at EASO and correlate who were the very most useful members of that committee with their scientific qualifications, I am not sure there would be a very strong correlation.

  32. Are you performing the role of departmental chief scientist for the DTI?
  (Sir Robert May) Not at all. In no sense whatsoever. That has never been on the table and had it been I would have vigorously resisted it. The reason indeed there is a director general of the research councils, again a distinguished outsider, within OST is so that I do not own any budget. Although OST has a £1.3 billion budget, there is a need for a separate individual, someone again of the intellectual, moral authority to speak to the community which the research councils speak to who owns that budget so that I as Chief Scientist can offer advice across the whole £6 billion R&D spend without being told to go away and spend my own money because I do not have any. By the same token, it is crucially important that I not be in any way confused with chief scientists within any one department but stand above them all so that I can even-handedly offer advice. I would say that distinction is more easily made than the one about the budget which sometimes does confuse people.

  33. You have told us the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions does not have a chief scientist. Why not and should it?
  (Sir Robert May) I am afraid this is some sort of misunderstanding. The old Department of the Environment, the new Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions, has a particularly effective and excellent and rather distinguished chief scientist called Dr David Fisk. Interestingly, before Environment and Transport were amalgamated, the Department of Transport had on the retirement of its chief scientist put together a little outside committee who had recommended and had recommendations accepted that it would probably be a good idea to get an outside chief scientist on the defence, health, OST model, who would not just be responsible for science but would sit on all major departmental committees. Then, with the restructuring and re-amalgamation, things were put together but they do not merely have someone called chief scientist but someone who in my opinion is exceptionally good.

Dr Jones

  34. You said that there were more scientists in the civil service than there had ever been. That is different to the evidence we have received for example from IPMS. Do you have figures which can back that up? Are you satisfied that the people who are acting in the role of chief scientific adviser in the departments are at an adequately senior grade?
  (Sir Robert May) I expressed myself carelessly. The proportion is higher; the absolute number is lower because the absolute size of the civil service has decreased. The civil service has gone down. I do not have the numbers to hand.

  35. Are these monitored? Do we keep records?
  (Sir Robert May) The assertion of the proportion is taken from a document which owes its origins to Mr Heseltine as part of his drive to try to have a civil service which was more active in recruiting people from outside it, to have wider experience and be more active in making sure people moved around among departments. As part of that there were figures, which I can supply, on the proportions of the civil service which had arts degrees versus technical qualifications in economics, law, science and technology. That is the basis of that assertion. On the other hand the absolute numbers will have gone down with the shrinkage of the civil service which has been quite pronounced over the last ten years.

Chairman

  36. If those figures are available we would welcome them. They would help us in our inquiry.
  (Sir Robert May) I will look for them.

Dr Jones

  37. The seniority point.
  (Sir Robert May) The seniority varies from department to department and reflects their judgements of their internal structure.

  38. Acting on your advice?
  (Sir Robert May) Many of them pre-date me. Difficult though it may be to come to terms with, I have only been around for a couple of years. More than half of these pre-date me and certainly structures pre-date me. I would say on the whole they make sense. On the other hand the Department of Transport's decision on that committee I just mentioned, which then was not implemented with the aggregation, was very much in consultation with my Office. Obviously like any group, I would plead specially for elevating the importance of my kind. Ultimately it is a decision for individual departments.

Dr Turner

  39. You passed several comments about specific departments in terms of their capacity to commission and evaluate scientific advice. But you were completely silent about MAFF. Are you prepared to make any comments on the capacity of MAFF to undertake that, given the record?
  (Sir Robert May) What I would say, and beyond which I will not say anything, is in recent affairs like the badgers and bovine TB and the implementation of an inquiry into whether we should discontinue quarantine on dogs and move to rabies vaccination, their conformance with the science advice and policy making has been just exemplary.


 
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