Examination of Witness (Questions 40 - 49)
WEDNESDAY 17 JUNE
SIR ROBERT
MAY
40. In 1996 you said that cuts in MAFF had damaged
the department's scientific capacity. Do we have an improved situation
since then?
(Sir Robert May) All I can say is that the situation
seems to me, as measured by the two examples I just quoted you,
to have been things which were handled very well.
41. Could you answer my question? Are you still
concerned about the scientific capacity of MAFF?
(Sir Robert May) There are two different questions.
One is the scientific capacity and I have said on the specific
examples I have been very happy with what happened. The earlier
statement I made is about the fact that under budgetary pressures
there is a general tendency, and I alluded to this earlier, as
understandable as I think it is unfortunate in the long run, to
see long-term research infrastructure as a relatively soft target.
For example, the National Health Service research budget, about
£400 million, was cut by about £11 million last winter
and that was done partly under the pressures of immediate patient
need. You can see how that happens. I am not saying there is any
long-term trend there, but were there a longer term trend, where
you always respond as it were to the person in the queue who writes
you a letter and you want the queue to be shortened, and you have
to find the money at the expense of longer term research which
is going to influence what queues exist and their length 20 years
from now, it is not always easy to make what I consider the wise
decision. That is a general and continuing concern of mine.
42. So you are not satisfied with the scientific
capacity.
(Sir Robert May) I have said it is a genuine continuing
concern of mine.
Chairman
43. Dr Jones has raised the whole question of
scientific advice in MAFF. How can we ever have got into the situation
with BSE when we have allegedly got a situation where we have
chief scientists, probably pre-dating yourself, and chief scientists
in government departments allowing the whole situation of feeding
animal proteins to vegetarian ruminants? How on earth did it happen
with scientific advisers when the most elementary biological students
at the age of 16 would have thought you do not feed animal protein
to vegetarian ruminants?
(Sir Robert May) Uncharacteristically I am going to
respond to that by saying this is all before my time.
44. I accept that.
(Sir Robert May) It is the subject of a separate inquiry,
which is already on the Internet and you can see some of the correspondence
between my predecessors and the office in question. I would rather
not offer secondary and tertiary comment on that.
Dr Gibson
45. Would you comment on the movement of a laboratory
from Norwich to York, the CSL laboratory? That was in your time?
Does that have an effect on the science base in that research
field?
(Sir Robert May) I am not sure; I am genuinely not
sure of that. This is a very clear example of something which
was within the ambit of a single department, which could have
wider implications. You could make a case for moving it, you could
make a case for not moving it. Some would argue that perhaps disproportionate
weight was given to the fact that a laboratory had been built
and needed to have some more people in it. Others would argue
that the decision was made on the merits of it. That did seem
to me to be a housekeeping issue for a particular department.
Mr Beard
46. You mentioned that your committee, EASO,
which gathers together chief scientific advisers who are from
different backgrounds, works very well when it comes to talking
with you. Do they work equally well when it comes to talking to
their own departments? What I am really trying to get at is how
well the scientific advice which a department has permeates the
department and actually influences the decision. It is one thing
to have commissioned it and have it in a report which sits on
a desk, but it is another thing to take it into account in arriving
at a decision.
(Sir Robert May) A very good question. I think the
answer is that in general the record is pretty good. The fact
is that you may have in your minds a catalogue of things which
went wrong, and in one case very expensively wrong, but that catalogue
is relatively restricted. When you think of the number and diversity
of things which come along day in and day out, most of them below
the threshold of perception, I would say that Whitehall does a
pretty good job of turning to the people they need to ask and
integrating their advice. As background to this you have this
huge catalogue of expert committees which different departments
have and 99 times out of 100 you would find need has been identified
and people have been consulted and the machinery has worked quite
well. I come back to repeat something I said earlier. The problems
we have in the large come not so much from not seeking the right
advice and digesting it, as from often though not always public
perception as to the extent to which we have done that.
47. What I am getting at is that a department
can often take a particular line. They get an ide«e fixe
about a particular issue and along comes the scientific adviser
and says that is wrong, they should be doing this. It is very
easy then to put that aside or else to take the scientist aside
and ask him to trim this conclusion a little bit or water it down
a little bit; it would be much more convenient, it would go through
much more easily, there would be less of a row. How much of that
goes on? If you do not have people who do punch their weight in
the department, is it not likely to go on?
(Sir Robert May) I do not think it goes on all that
much. I may be betraying the fact that I have been in Whitehall
too long you understand, but I do not think it goes on as often
as you may feel.
Dr Williams
48. The dilemma to me, the problem to me, is
that I take it generally that scientists work with great integrity,
they produce a very solid report, strong recommendations but that
then comes up against vested interests. That is certainly the
case within MAFF. The agriculture lobby is very strong, the political
lobby is very strong and civil servants as well as the Ministers
did not, could not face the implementation of some of the recommendations,
certainly of the Southwood report on BSE. There is a real problem.
With food and nutrition in MAFF the facts are known, there is
a link with heart disease, too much sugar in diet and yet the
food and nutrition committee could not bring out proper recommendations.
The science is very clear, the scientific advice may be clear,
but there comes a point where you come up against a brickwall
of vested interest. The oil and fossil fuel lobby, the way they
tried to undermine the Kyoto deal. I am not blaming you particularly
for this but that is the political reality at the end of the day
and in MAFF's case the scientists involved there were just not
strong enough, did not carry enough clout to persuade their civil
servants or persuade their Ministers.
(Sir Robert May) Let me offer you a different version
and this is personal opinion which is secondary comment on other
people's primary facts. Let me offer you a personal opinion about
MAFF. Yes, there will always be people coming from different directions
with different pressures. I see the primary problem in the BSE
story as being uncovered by the committee of inquiry, one where
the scientific uncertainties were so great that it was hard to
offer unambiguous science advice. Anderson has suggested to that
inquiry, and as a secondary comment on that which is on the Internet
for that inquiry, he has offered the opinion that had the data
been made available to him earlier, then the kind of analysis
he could have done on it, along the lines of the similar analysis
he had done very early on for AIDS, similar in that you do not
see people getting infected with HIV or the cattle getting infected
with BSE, you only see them a long and indeterminate time later
when they come down with AIDS or with BSE, he would have been
able to illuminate aspects of that epidemic. He would for example
have been able to show that the feed ban was not being fully implemented.
The fact that the data was not made available was to my mind in
large part because it simply was not appreciated within MAFF what
recent advances in that rather new kind of science were capable
of doing. It was not blinkered interests not doing something,
it was a lack of the awareness of what was capable of being done
which was not capable of being done ten years ago. Had that analysis
been done and the facts been presented, I fully believe that no
propensity to wish to believe one thing or another would have
stood up against them. I may be wrong but I read that record which
is being read into the public domain by other people. My personal
view on that is that it is, to a first approximation, a story
of people who did not fully understand just how much could be
done by advances they were not fully aware of. That comes back
to my point that it is more important to make sure you know whom
to ask and where to go and what questions you need to ask. That
is the hard part. I may be wrong.
Dr Turner
49. Can you give your opinion as to the extent
to which departments use the results from the Foresight programme
to inform decisions about the strategic direction of their own
research programmes?
(Sir Robert May) This is a question which I had expected
to be asked and I have a catalogue, which I could give you best
in writing for the record, of anecdotes from the Health and Safety
Executive, Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions,
OST itself, MOD, Scottish Office, Northern Ireland Office, Welsh
Office, International Development, MAFF and research councils
themselves. I will offer you a written response on that if I may?
In short, I think the combination of the committee of Ministers
from different departments, the committee of a Whitehall group
of people in departments, the energy on which this whole enterprise
of Foresight runs, namely the free energy which comes in from
academics and business and industrial people from outside, from
all the fact that some bits have gone better than others, really
is having an effect in Whitehall, as in the academic world, and,
more slowly but still pronouncedly, in the world of business.
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