Examination of Witness (Questions 40 -
56)
TUESDAY 27 JUNE 2000
PROFESSOR MALCOLM
GRANT
Mr Mitchell
40. You could put it on the Internet.
(Professor Grant) I am hoping that just about everything
we do will be on the Internet. Certainly we are proposing that
on the Internet should go our agendas, on the Internet should
go our reports, should go the minutes of our meetings. That would
therefore be an entirely appropriate means of disseminating the
sort of verbatim report that we have just been discussing.
Mr Drew
41. In all the publicity that surrounded your
appointment, and I have got the press release here which talked
about a new GM advisory body that is "your voice in Government".
I gather, I do not know if this is yourself or words agreed with
yourself, you are quoted as saying "people to see the Commission
as their voice on this issue", talking about GMOs. What are
going to be the processes of actually engaging in discussion,
debate, with the public? You have talked about there may be some
public fora.
(Professor Grant) Yes.
42. Can you just explain perhaps in more detail
how you personally see that evolving?
(Professor Grant) Again, subject to whatever the Commission
may agree next week, I think this is one of the most challenging
parts of our process actually. I do feel that the public generally,
and I count myself as a member of the public in this debate, is
disenfranchised and, as it were, left out of the debate. I feel
that we are being given a range of conflicting opinion by a number
of organisations, some of which have primary agendas, some of
which have sub agendas to pursue. How you engage members of the
public in the debate that we are now being tasked to undertake
is very much more difficult. Certainly by having a website one
engages that still relatively small part of society which is Internet
friendly and able to make use of it and has the interest to do
so. I think that we need to look much more closely at experiences
that other Commissions and bodies have used with public consensus
meetings, with citizens' juries, with public meetings, involving
public evidence taking sessions, with producing fact sheets, reports,
press releases, trying to improve public understanding of the
issues that are involved in the debate and also listening to what
the public says. All of this within a fairly limited budget. It
is a big challenge.
43. You have got five members of staff.
(Professor Grant) Yes.
44. What happens if you get inundated by thousands
and thousands of enquiries? I am talking about my experience,
I get more letters on GMOs than I do on hunting. I know that Stroud
may be unusual but I do not think it is that unusual. I think
you will find that people will pore over every word of your reports,
every statement you make. How do you gear up for something of
that level of intensity?
(Professor Grant) It is part of our working methods.
It is something to which we as a Commission have not yet given
any consideration. It will be in part also a question of resources.
You are absolutely right to warn us of the potential for being
overwhelmed by public response and it is something that we are
going to need to consider very carefully. We have not yet got
a worked out strategy for it.
45. At the same time clearly everyone is entitled
to their opinion but you are trying to judge as objectively as
possible what public opinion has to say. For example, maybe this
is something coming up next week, would you talk about strategies
such as using focus groups or more particularly citizens' juries
which have got a track record of trying to bring conflicting groups
of people in this together to try and draw out what are the commonly
agreed standpoints? Are those the sorts of ideas you may be investing
time and, dare I say, money into covering?
(Professor Grant) Yes, indeed. I do believe that we
have to look at the examples of these, some of which are now quite
well developed in the environmental area, for example in relation
to human genetics, in relation to the disposal of radioactive
waste where the Environment Council has done a great deal of work
on consensus building and trying to reflect upon public opinion
as to the choices. In turn we shall be reflecting on those experiences
and trying to develop a strategy that will help this Commission
find a way forward.
46. To what extent will you take the lead from
the public in as much as if you get an overwhelming response on
a particular item that you have got as part of an overall agenda,
is it likely that you will see this as something important that
could frame the inquiries that you intend to pursue?
(Professor Grant) I said at the outset that I was
going to be something of a sceptical Chairman. I think that when
one looks at public response one needs to ask why it is, why it
has come about. This is an area in which public response can be
whipped up and one in which I think we need to be cautious not
to measure the weight of public opinion by the volume of response
that is received. It would be foolish, I think, to assume there
was a direct relationship between the two.
47. So to some extent you are seeing yourselves
as reflecting the interests of the public but also guiding the
public, not necessarily to think this but to understand what it
is that, if you like, the framework of the debate is based upon?
Is that a fair assessment?
(Professor Grant) I do think that puts it very well,
yes.
48. Finally, on this idea of interface with
the public, and the net is obviously a standard way in which people
now respond, as you made quite clear, and I thought you put it
very well, you do not want to go to public meetings where in a
sense you could become the whipping boys of whoever happens to
be there and, dare I say, media intrusion and so on. To talk to
a lot of people is a difficult process, so how could you do that?
Is it possible that you will take hearings around the country,
for example? I gather this is something that the Food Standards
Agency is aiming to do, to go out and directly engage with the
public. Is that something you foresee as being possible and practicable?
(Professor Grant) Yes, I do. We will be talking further
to the Food Standards Agency about the programme that they are
already putting into place. From our point of view we have got
to be sure that whatever method we choose is genuinely engaging
with the public. This is a debate that has a capacity to be hijacked
and I and my fellow Commissioners have got to be tremendously
careful about how we manage it in order to ensure that we are
hearing some genuine voices in the debate.
Chairman
49. Professor Grant, where are you going to
meet normally?
(Professor Grant) Subject to our meeting next week
in Cambridge where we will discuss our working methods, I would
not regard us as having necessarily a normal meeting place. My
view about this is that we should attempt to meet in environments
that could be regarded as relatively neutral. I think a university
environment, for example, is one such. I have an aversion to settling
down to any single method of operating. I want to challenge the
Commission to think more innovatively about how it will work and
I think that implies we will meet in different parts of the country.
50. You said earlier that the problem with the
debate at the moment is that it could easily become irrational
and emotional and you wish to introduce a calm, effective rationality
to it. The problem is to be rational, calm, reasonable and come
out of it with headlines that are pithy, epigrammatic, you have
got to compete with Frankenstein foods and all that. Do you intend
to be your own press spokesman? If not, why not?
(Professor Grant) Could you repeat the last part of
your question?
51. Do you intend to insist that you be the
public voice of the Commission so that the public has one person
with which it identifies this reasonable consensual point of view,
if it is indeed your intention to represent that view against
what you have described as the rational environment around you?
(Professor Grant) I think so far as dealings with
the press are concerned, the Commission has to work out a modus.
We have 20 Commissioners, many of whom are already high profile
people with long experience of talking to the press. There is
certainly no way in which it is conceivable that one could suppress
that natural tendency. In terms of speaking on behalf of the Commission
there does need to be a concentration on who should do it and
I am sure it will fall primarily to the Chair and Deputy Chair
but there will be occasions on which it will be strategically
important to invite other Commissioners to lead the dealings with
the press. Again, that is something we will need to consider in
our meeting next week. We have an enormously important mission
in ensuring that the debate in which we are now to play a central
part is accurately reported.
52. Have you been offered any advice on this?
(Professor Grant) I should say I have been offered
advice on just about everything in the last three weeks to do
with this Commission, much of it gratuitous. We have not been
offered specific advice on this but we shall take it.
53. You said earlier on in reply to a question
from Dr Turner that your advice could be rejected by the Government
for reasons of good politics or bad politics. Could you demonstrate
what you mean by "good politics" and by "bad politics"?
(Professor Grant) I think I would rather recognise
it when it occurred than to give you examples up front. This Government
has very clearly committed itself to setting up a Commission and
to listening to it. I would be astonished if the Commission's
careful deliberations were ever to be arbitrarily rejected by
Ministers. If they were to be I would have thought that was not
terribly clever politics.
54. And you would feel the need to express that,
because after all if your Commission had reached a unanimous view
and you were the spokesman for the Commission, in a sense you
would be letting down the Commission, would you not, if you did
not articulate the feeling that the Government had not been reasonable
in its rejection?
(Professor Grant) Absolutely, there is no question
about that.
55. We trust that your reports will be clear
and in plain English. Giving people access is one thing but enabling
them to understand it is another, so I trust that both will be
in order. Professor Grant, we said that we expected to last about
an hour, we started two minutes early and we are going to finish
a couple of minutes early as well, so we will have had you in
front of us for an hour. We are grateful to you for coming. You
have more or less invited yourself back, if I may say so. Once
the thing is up and running and we see how it is working out and
we can all form judgments then I think we would be very interested
in hearing from you in perhaps a year's time how things have gone,
how you think it is evolving, how you are fitting into this constellation
and whether you think the debate has taken a more reflective course
as a result of it. Meanwhile, we recognise you have got an absolute
bastard of a job and I suppose we are grateful that you took it,
although I do not understand why. We wish you luck with your Commission
and we look forward to as and when remaining in touch with you
and, as I say, we will probably see you quite a lot informally
but certainly in about a year from now we look forward to inviting
you back to see how you think it has gone and whether the grey
hairs have accumulated or not. Thank you very much indeed for
coming in today.
(Professor Grant) May I thank you very much. I did
feel this session was premature because of the lack yet of any
meeting of the Commission. I do look forward to an opportunity
of communicating both informally and formally with this Committee
and, indeed, should an invitation come from you in 12 months'
time I will be delighted to tell you something of the workings
of the Commission then.
56. We decided to invite you—I do not
wish to continue this debate—because I think one of the
roles of Parliament is to keep an overview of the people Government
appoints even before they have had a chance to get into the job
to see whether they think they are capable of doing the job. You
think it is slightly premature, we think in constitutional terms
it is important, as we did to Sir John Krebs, that we should take
a look at them to see why the Government has appointed them, what
we think they are made of and whether we think they can do the
job. You will recall the Treasury Committee recently said it did
not think one of its witnesses was capable of doing the job but
I do not think we are likely to come to any such conclusion. Thank
you for coming in today.
(Professor Grant) I am obliged.
Chairman: Thank you.
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