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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