Examination of Witness (Questions 50 - 59)
WEDNESDAY 17 JUNE
SIR ROBERT
MAY
Mr Beard
50. How often has the Cross-Whitehall
Foresight Coordinating Group met? Why are its minutes not published?
(Sir Robert May) It has met something like 12 times
since its formation; of the order of six times since last summer.
The reason the minutes had not been made public is just that they
are dead boring. Basically the minutes record matters of operational
detail and in so far as there is interesting stuff in them, they
are digested and described periodically in the published reports,
like the report on the Whitehall audit of the Foresight programme
which the incoming Government published in October 1997 or the
Whitehall Foresight progress report which was published just yesterday.
There is no reason in principle why the minutes themselves should
not be published or be available. I should be happy to do that.
51. A lot of public sector research establishments
have been privatised. How do you think that has affected the ability
of departments to which they related to continue to be intelligent
customers of scientific advice and commissioning of research?
(Sir Robert May) To a first approximation it has not
really made a significant difference. The important thing really
is clarifying the customer/contractor relationship: what it is
the customer wants, what it is the contractor is to deliver. You
do not have to privatise things to do that. You can do that either
way and that is the issue. You can have that done either way.
The one minor apprehension I would have, treading a bit more dangerously,
is that there are some kinds of long-term infrastructure to respond
to things which you do not expect necessarily today or tomorrow
which require long-term investment in research which is more easily
done in the public sector. That is the nature of the public sector.
There are some kinds of institutions which I believe, in order
to serve that which we need them for, need to be kept in the public
sector and that was very much in the mind of OST as we conducted
the prior options review. Such institutions were kept in the public
sector.
52. Do you think one of the possible fallouts
of BSE, which is not going into the depths of it, but also other
issues which have been issues of public scientific notoriety—and
Dr Williams mentioned the various conflicting advice given on
food and there have been various forensic scandals—do you
think these have weakened public respect for scientific advice?
(Sir Robert May) It is difficult to distinguish between
the scientific advice as such and the policy things which are
drawn from it. There are many studies over recent years, as you
know, which suggest if you ask people whom they trust, Government
scientists, university scientists, environmental lobby group scientists,
they tend to respond by saying they trust lobby group scientists
more than academic scientists more than Government scientists,
which I think is a curious result. My personal response is that
I trust academic scientists in general more than lobby group scientists
and Government scientists.
53. Is that not partly because they feel the
internal scientists have been nobbled? It almost goes back to
the question of trust.
(Sir Robert May) No, because they do not come from
a particular viewpoint to begin with. I trust all of them to a
higher degree than the general public would appear to do. We have
a problem which is a very real problem, partly associated with
a more general distrust for authority. It is harder to be a primary
school teacher today than it was 30 years ago and that is in some
sense part of the same phenomenon which has good aspects to it
and bad aspects to it. I do see the problem as one of somehow
using the expert without the negative connotations which the use
of the word expert can evoke.
54. What is the answer to the problem?
(Sir Robert May) In a sense I touched on this earlier
when I said I think the answer is greater openness, embracing
the difficulties which go with that, letting ideas contend in
the marketplace. If you take how the Government reacted, to go
back a few years, to the initial HIV/AIDS epidemic, the Department
of Health reacted to that by turning immediately to the best people
they could find, making the data available, a variety of interpretations
contended not just in the marketplace but in the newspapers indeed.
Some felt that the Government's attitude to that was excessively
alarmist, but at the same time I think the end product of that
was not one of distrust in the process. The disagreements were
never hindered and the outcome of a precautionarily alarmist view
that the Government took has been that for all the continuing
problems and distress that that particular epidemic causes in
Britain, it is considerably less of a problem here than in other
countries which tried to issue reassuring messages to people.
Dr Jones
55. But there were no commercial pressures when
it came to that, were there? Not so much.
(Sir Robert May) They may not have been commercial
pressures but certainly if you look to other countries, if you
look to the pressures for example not to embrace a better understanding
of the sexual behaviour of needle sharers, to embrace effectiveness
over attitudinising with respect to providing clean needles, you
can take a whole set of things which are not just commercial but
go to the heart of exposing a controversy and making difficult
decisions. The needle sharing is a very good one, where we very
early on recognised that, transcending any message unconsciously
portrayed by providing drug users with clean needles, was the
need to save lives and we promptly did it, whereas in North America
it is still not done.
Mr Beard
56. If I understand your answer, you would be
in favour effectively of publishing all the scientific advice
which goes to a Minister prior to a final decision. There may
be some difference in the actual memos which pass between officials
saying how they interpret it, but you would be in favour of publishing
it.
(Sir Robert May) In general and subject to two things.
First of all, there is a Freedom of Information Act in the pipeline
and that will have various constraints within it, most of which
just come from common sense. There will be some things which touch
on security issues. Coming back to HIV, there is an interesting
case where I said the data was made public, but it was made public
in a way that had to anonymise the sources. There will be issues
of privacy and data protection in some of the things and there
will sometimes be issues of commercial or other confidentiality.
In general I am for openness and taking risks in doing it. Let
me give you a concrete example which I think is insufficiently
appreciated. The Prime Minister, in his party conference speech
in September, chose climate change as one of the themes. Not an
uncontroversial subject. In connection with that, in the space
of about ten days I consulted both with colleagues in Whitehall
and colleagues in the academic community to prepare both a digest
of the international community's view of the facts and my own
personal recommendations as to the policy recommendations I would
recommend on that basis: it was a mixture of a digest of science
advice and tentative policy suggestions from a permanent secretary
to the Prime Minister. We then published that report as a note
and the Prime Minister held it up and said everyone in the country
should read it, on the same day as he gave the speech. That in
one sense flies flatly against one of the basic rules of Whitehall
that private advice to a Minister and a fortiori advice
to the Prime Minister for a party speech, is confidential. But
there was much discussion about this because in this particular
case it was dealing essentially with the scientific community's
analysis of the uncertainties, and conclusions drawn from them
by the Chief Scientist, and it was felt that public interest was
best served by just putting that out to let people quarrel with
it. I think that was an interesting and not easily taken decision,
but to me it is a model of how one should do this. There should
not be blanket rules in my view. There have to be occasions when
civil servants' advice to a Minister has to be confidential to
let the array of frank opinions flourish. I certainly see the
need to reserve case by case decision of when the policy advice
is confidential. I would see very, very few cases where the science
advice from which the policy guidance was offered should ever
be confidential.
57. There are going to be controversies around
any of this advice; it is not going to be a platonic discussion
in most cases, is it? There is going to be a row. There are going
to be conflicting opinions and scientists will put different views
of the facts forward and have experimental results very probably.
(Sir Robert May) Yes.
58. Is that really going to enhance public confidence
if the public cannot understand the nuances of the argument? For
instance, a lot of the advice on food and good diet has become
extremely contradictory and the public generally are flummoxed
by that.
(Sir Robert May) I see the problems in this Brave
New World I envisage in which one embraces this controversy. But
I see no alternative. I have a wonderful quote which I brought
along for this question. It is words which Brecht put into the
mouth of Galileo. He said that the aim of science is not to open
a door to infinite wisdom but to set a limit to infinite error.
That is a more poetic way of saying science in my view is more
a way of asking questions than it is of giving answers. Understandably
but unfortunately the science we meet in school and often in university
covers the things which have been answered. We get a spurious
impression that science is giving us the answer. Most of the problems
we deal with which are of interest, and we have been talking about
this afternoon, are things where there is a spectrum of opinion,
sometimes two opinions which is the thing the media like most
because it is like a sporting game. I sometimes feel that most
of the scientific press, as you have heard me say before, graduated
from sports first. There are sometimes three opinions, sometimes
four, a spectrum of opinion which over time narrows. We need to
communicate to the public that it is a foredoomed attempt to have
everybody understanding scientific details of every issue. Far
more important is to communicate a sense of what science is aiming
to do, how it is aiming to sharpen the questions. That means there
will be a mess out there. I say one last thing in this context.
There was a very interesting series of public opinion polls in
Europe. The countries whose citizens do best at answering not
just little factoid questions, does the sun go round the earth
or the earth round the sun, but answering substantial questions
about the understanding of the scientific method, the experimental
method, nature of statistical inference, those same countries
are the countries whose citizens are more questioning of scientific
issues. The notion that we will have easier discussion if everyone
is more scientifically literate is not true, nor should it be.
Mrs Spelman
59. You have described some of the vehicles
of the openness but what about the specific proposals for consensus
conferences and citizens' juries? Do you think these bodies are
vulnerable, could be hijacked by groups with vested interests?
Is the threshold level of scientific understanding in the wider
community sufficient to make them work? Would you like to comment
specifically on the planned public consultation exercise for biological
sciences?
(Sir Robert May) Here I will give you a supplementary
written paper[9]
because there is a lot of detail to develop on that. Very quickly
let me say the following. Firstly, there is no such thing as the
public. Often the question is posed in terms of consulting the
public, although you did not do so. There are many, many publics
and your question could be rephrased: how do you consult a broad
and representative spectrum and not let yourself be captured by
special interest groups? We are still learning how to do that.
The Minister for Science, Industry and Energy, John Battle's desire
to have public consultation around various issues in bio-ethics
involves going slowly, to think very carefully through how best
to do this. Part of the answer has to be, if you are going to
have consensus conferences, taking the time and trouble to work
with people beforehand to provide accessible information about
the issues in question. Part of it has to be making sure you get
a representative set of people. It is a hugely complicated set
of questions and I anticipate we will make mistakes as we learn
to do this and we will try not to do it in a big rush. I will
amplify that.
9 To be printed on report. Back
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