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Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology
10.30 pm
Mr. Richard Allan (Sheffield, Hallam): I beg to move,
- That this House approves the First Report from the Information Committee on the Future of the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (HC 659).
I woke up this morning to hear the "Today" programme headlined by two science issues--bovine spongiform encephalopathy in connection with French beef, and the availability of the drug Relenza in the national health service. It is not uncommon for such key scientific issues to be prominent in the media. I think of issues such as genetics, global warming and climate change, the internet, medicines, stem cell research--the list goes on. Science stories have in some ways replaced the funny item at the end of the news, but they are far more serious and generate more public interest.
The response must be to improve the information sources available to us as legislators. It is sometimes hard for us to admit our ignorance. We are expected to be experts on everything, but science and technology issues often test us and, in many cases, they are not issues of party politics. I would argue that a debate such as the stem cell research debate is tougher than many of the others that we face in the House.
The Select Committee on Information wishes to do all it can to ensure that hon. Members have the best information possible to support their decisions. There is a phrase in computer science, "Garbage in, garbage out." We cannot guarantee that the reverse applies--that quality information in will result in quality legislation out, but the odds on creating good legislation have to be higher if Members are better informed. The recommendations in the report seek to do exactly that.
POST was established on a temporary basis and reviewed by previous Information Committees in 1991 and again in 1995. I know that veterans of that debate are present tonight--the hon. Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Mr. Miller), for example. The key recommendation in the report before us tonight is that POST should be made permanent from April 2001. We believe that that will provide security for the institution and its staff and will make possible some of the other developments for which we have argued in the report.
We hope to see an improved career structure for staff working for Parliament in science and technology. We also recommend that the board structure remain essentially as it is, as it has served POST well. I know that the chairman of the board, the hon. Member for Norwich, North (Dr. Gibson), has devoted a great deal of his time to ensuring the success of POST over recent years, as did the former distinguished chairman, the hon. Member for Rayleigh (Dr. Clark), who chaired the board for a considerable period. The board structure also allows important voices to be brought in from the wider scientific community, which adds to the work of POST.
Finally, I refer to some of the key facts that demonstrate the value of POST to date, which we fully expect to be carried into the future. The list of POST notes is in the report and shows how productive the team has been. It is a small team of hard-working and skilled scientists with a high rate of output. Their timeliness has been excellent. I refer the House to the stem cell research report, which it produced in June this year, well ahead of the public debate. This timely and high quality advice is likely to increase in value to Members over time.
The Chairman of the Science and Technology Committee referred to a paper in Nature in his submission to the Information Committee, which demonstrates how science and technology issues have moved up the parliamentary agenda over recent years. I have mentioned the increasing media interest, and Members' postbags will testify to their constituents' growing interest.
I shall bring my comments to a close by quoting some of the evidence that was presented to the Information Committee. In keeping with the debate earlier today, it is from the Chairman of the Select Committee on Northern Ireland Affairs, who wrote to us:
- As you might expect, the Committee has made infrequent use of the services of POST as relatively few scientific and technological matters fall within its remit. However, for an inquiry last year, the Committee sought evidence from the Meteorological Office on the possibility that global warming might enhance the frequency of severe storms in Northern Ireland. It received a highly technical submission from the Hadley Centre for Climate Change (part of the Meteorological Office), of which, at the Committee's request, POST promptly prepared an excellent non-technical digest. The language of this formed the basis of the relevant paragraph in the Committee's report.
The Committee found it very useful to have the necessary expertise in-house.
10.35 pm
Dr. Ian Gibson (Norwich, North): I am proud to be chair of the POST board, which contains representatives of the Library, Members of both Houses and distinguished scientists from the community outside this place. The board considers all the issues that are relevant today and will be relevant over the next few months, and asks POST employees to get on with the job of providing us with the information that will help us in our debates. That is done in a very neutral way; POST does not take a biased or political view. It is sensitive to people's interests and is extremely informative.
I recently attended, on behalf of the POST board, a meeting in Berlin. There were many people there from other Parliaments who looked forward to having access to information of a scientific, medical or technical nature to inform new legislation. The POST board and its work were held in the highest esteem. Many Governments of other countries have now said, "The structure that you have in the British Parliament is wonderful; we should do that."
I am very proud to have been the chair of the board and to have heard the debates. In a previous life, I was head of a large university department, which attained one
of the highest levels of excellence in the research assessment exercise. If I were assessing the POST board and its work, I would say that they were five star, like some of the departments at Oxford, Cambridge and elsewhere. POST's work is amazingly good and very informative.In many debates in this place hon. Members use what POST says, and many hon. Members read it over their cornflakes or at their dinner table and inform themselves, and benefit from the erudition that is in those documents.
There are many things that we could look forward to doing in terms of science and technology. The hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Mr. Allan) spoke about the paper referred to in Nature. That is the highest accolade of publication. Probably I was one of the authors of the article that is mentioned, and to get it in Nature is five star in itself, which is not bad for an MP--it is better than I ever did when I was the boss of a university department, so being a Member of Parliament is not too bad in terms of being recognised.
On scientific and technological issues, such as telecommunications masts and mobile telephones, POST informs people in this place and the other place of the science and technology involved, the issues that we should focus on and the difficulties of legislation in those areas, based on good and proper science. I am proud to say that POST has distinguished itself internationally. It is recognised across Europe, and many other countries, including the United States, are now adopting the way that it operates. I hope that, in future, one or two additional members of staff will allow us to penetrate other areas of science, such as medicine, that are coming up very fast. The three people who work at POST could be increased to four or five without any detriment to the information that helps us take our decisions.
I hope that the House will support this very thorough report. Many of us have spoken, in Select Committees and elsewhere, of our interest in scientific developments that are taking place countrywide. POST has really been successful in informing the public and getting the public involved in science. No organisation in this country knows better how to get technical and difficult information over to the public. POST has taken on that important role seriously.
Hon. Members will know from the debate on stem cells that we had in the House last Friday that we spent many minutes discussing how the public would understand a stem cell and the potential advantages of the research. POST's report helped that debate and moved it forward.
The House should award its accolades to POST for what it has done from its small base just 200 yards away. We should provide it with the status and permanency that will ensure that we are better informed, that our publications are more effective and that resources are provided. Debates on science, technology and medicine feature more prominently than ever before, and there has been a sixfold increase in the number of parliamentary questions on those subjects in the past few years.
I have heard science quoted in the House that does us real discredit, but POST has helped to raise standards and made us much more scientifically literate. None of us will ever be a Nobel prize winner, but at least we shall understand the issues and be able to talk to our constituents on a much more informed basis. POST has played a major part in enabling us to do that.
10.41 pm
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