Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40
- 58)
WEDNESDAY 22 OCTOBER 2003
PROFESSOR MALCOLM
GRANT
Q40 Patrick Hall: Picking up from
the earlier remarks about whether or not ministers could have
been more helpful in stimulating a debate (and of course this
select committee is independently administered) what could ministers
have done? If ministers had said they were against GM there was
no debate to be had and if they said strongly and controversially
they were in favour of GM then that would have surely undermined
the debate because it would strengthen those who say the Government
has made its mind up anyway and will not listen to the debate.
I just throw that in. Can I ask maybe the main question which
is that you touched on the fact that what has happened here (with
its limitations perhaps) is nonetheless valuable if one looks
at what has or has not happened elsewhere. Did you have time to
do a quick review of any evidence of public debate in other countries.
The United States and other parts of the world have committed
themselves to GM to an incredible extent I suspect without much
prior public debate. Did you have time to look at that international
situation?
Professor Grant: Yes we did and
I commend to you a full report the COI did for us looking at debates,
discussions or consultations that had taken place in other countries.
The two leading ones were ones that I mentioned earlier in New
Zealand and the Netherlands. One thing about both of those examples
(and I think it is probably true of other countries where similar
discussions have taken place) is that at a certain point in each
of those processes there was a fragmentation of the stakeholders
by which I mean a number of the environmental NGOs walked out
of the process and no longer found themselves committed to it.
One thing that this Steering Board has done and delivered to you
and to ministers is a community that has supported a process.
We have not at any time lost our stakeholders. We have managed
to hold them together around the process. That is, again, a tribute
to the Steering Board who are pretty diverse people. They actually
shared one common thing, which was a commitment to making the
debate work.
Q41 Diana Organ: I am glad that you
said that in the responses that you had there seemed to be some
mistrust of Government. I think I would be more worried if there
was not some mistrust of Government, the whole point of having
a debate is that people will have differing views. Patrick Hall
raised the point that you had said that you wanted a sharper counterpoint
because you would have preferred a stronger statement from ministers,
but is not the whole point of this exercise that Government is
waiting for the result of the consultation, what is it that people
have got to say in the debate, otherwise it will be, as many said
in their memoranda to us, a window dressing exercise? How much
was it a window dressing exercise?
Professor Grant: I can assure
you from my position there was no window and no dressing. We were
engaged in this to make it work. None of us on that committee
had any brief for Government. What we did have a commitment to
was being true to our promise to deliver an effective public debate.
Going back to your question about what ministers might have said,
the political landscape of the whole GM debate has been shifting
quite subtly almost day-by-day throughout this whole process.
At the beginning the dilemma that I could see was that ministers
were being squeezed. On the one hand they had a sceptical public
and a consumer reaction against GM, on the other hand they were
locked into decision-making under European Directive 2001/18 which
has a very narrow set of criteria for the release of GMOs into
the environment, but in the meantime that started to change. It
started to change not least because of the science review, the
Farm Scale Evaluations, the new work that is now being done on
co-existence which will amend that Directive and actually allow
Member States to set up co-existence rules which would otherwise
cut across the pure criteria of the Directive. So the Government
has more space now than it had at the outset of the process. At
the outset of the process it seemed to be saying to people, "We
are holding a big public debate but at the same time we are having
to participate in decision-making in a very narrow framework under
the Directive".
Q42 Diana Organ: The public put their
faith in this exercise, which I have to say is an unusual exercise
and if anything we are to be congratulated that we have done this
engagement, it is an extension of democracy, but it is a double-edged
sword. It is no good doing it unless there is a recognition by
the people who have been involved in the debate that actually
the consultation has been listened to. What would you want to
see in terms of Government policy as a result of this debate that
would give you a measure of success, that said that this debate
was worthwhile and successful because Government is saying this
or doing that in response?
Professor Grant: What I would
like to see the Government do, and as they have promised to do,
is to respond to the debate in public and to identify in future
policy making how it is that the debate has been taken into account
and what effect it has had on Government thinking. I think that
is the simplest and most fundamental expectation that we should
have of Government. How and when they do that is very much a matter
for your next witness.
Q43 Diana Organ: If the Government
does not reflect the findings of the debate in its decisions,
will the whole exercise have been a failure?
Professor Grant: Yes.
Q44 Diana Organ: So you want the
consultation to have had a real effect on Government policy?
Professor Grant: I want the Government
to be able to demonstrate, as it has promised to do, how it has
taken into account the findings from the debate.
Diana Organ: As a result of the debate
there was obviously genuinely across the board an anti-GM response.
In recent days, of course, because of farm trials it has added
extra information to the whole debate because the scientific evidence
that is coming back from the farm trials, and I know we are not
going into that in this inquiry—
Chairman: No, we are not.
Q45 Diana Organ: We are not and I
do not want to go into that. What I am saying is let us say the
information that had come from the scientific study was that actually
GM was okay for the environment and did not harm biodiversity
but the consultation that had gone out to the public came back
and said "We do not want it", if the Government then
said "In our policy we are all for GM", that would still
be a failure, would it not, because you have not influenced Government
decision making?
Professor Grant: There is a lot
of hypothesis in that. One thing I would stress is the range of
views that we had from the public on different issues. It was
not just about the science. Indeed, it is interesting that this
is not a debate about science. This is a debate about a number
of issues and one of them is to do with the ownership of the technology,
the impact of the technology potentially on less developed countries.
It is to do with the consumer response to GM. It may well be that
if the FSEs had gone the other way and GM crops were grown in
the UK, nonetheless there would still be a significant consumer
reaction against that. There are big issues in this debate and
I think it will be interesting to see how the Government responds
to all of them.
Q46 Mr Breed: Somewhat ironically
at this time we are coming to talk about the timing of the debate
in a few moments, both in terms of its duration and the period
of the year in which it took place. I recognise there were some
difficulties in terms of devolved administrations having their
own elections and so on, but could you give us some comments first
of all on the duration of the exercise. Was it, in fact, long
enough? Could it have been longer and, if so, would it have helped?
In other words, was it too short? In that context, it has been
reported to me that in some cases it was very difficult to get
hold of the packs for people to have their own debates in that
period of time. There were quite a few people organising their
own public debates and wanting to have the packs but apparently
they were extremely difficult to get hold of. Then there was the
case of the farmers themselves because that period was probably
one of the busiest periods of time of their work, harvesting and
everything else. Do you think that the timing in the year did
have an effect on farmers' ability to be able to participate actively
in the debate itself?
Professor Grant: First of all,
duration: six weeks was too short. We had not wished for six weeks
but we were working, however, against an iron cast requirement
from the Government that we should report by the end of September
and our timing came back from there. In my view the right time
would have been about three months, no longer.
Q47 Mr Breed: Had that been the case
it would have also included the field trials results and everything
else.
Professor Grant: Let me come to
that because that was always a moving feast. Three months is ample,
I think, it focuses attention for that period and that is long
enough. That was the advice that we had from other experiences
elsewhere in the world. As to the timing of those three months,
again my preference would have been for not doing it in the summer
obviously because it is not only farmers who may be disadvantaged
(although I understand they work all year round), but also universities
and schools who I would very much have wanted to try to engage
and this was the worst possible time to do that. There was an
issue around the timing of elections in devolved administrations
which postponed the start of the debate and the squeeze at the
end of the debate because of the Secretary of State's insistence
about the closing time. Also, my preference would have been to
have been able to have extended the period of the debate so as
to take into account the findings of the Strategy Unit and of
the science review and of the FSEs. Each of those would have enhanced
and enriched the debate that we had.
Q48 Alan Simpson: I take the points
that you make about the seriousness with which the Government
needs to take the findings of the debate because it does have
much wider implications around the issue of trust. I was just
a bit more surprised that your view about what lessons are to
be learned, although they are quite specific for the Government,
are less self-critical about your own role in that and the remit
given to any similar body. I ought to say I have an interesting
relationship with the debates because I took part in a number
of them, got banned from one of them and was providing solace
for quite a large number of groups in locations who were not able
to get into them. I am just surprised that until you just responded
to Colin's point, you had nothing to say that I found useful about
the sequence of the debate. Much of the criticism that I came
across was about the public being able to take part in a debate
in advance of essential evidence that ought to have been part
of that debate, so many people felt conned by the sequence. You
just mentioned that you would have liked to have expanded the
debate to be able to incorporate the results of the Science Panel
and the farm trials. Would it not have been better to have had
the sequence the other way around so the evidence was available
before the public were asked to debate it?
Professor Grant: Yes.
Q49 Alan Simpson: So it is not a
question of expanding the timetable, we should have had the evidence
base in place to be offered to the public before the public were
asked to participate?
Professor Grant: Yes. When the
Secretary of State set up the whole process, she did so on the
basis of those three strands moving together. We were very anxious
to try to ensure that the economics review and the science review
fed into the public debate. Ultimately, the timing of the publication
of those two documents made that very difficult, that was right
towards the end of our period. The FSEs, of course, were entirely
outside our control. Our original assumption had been that they
would be published in the summer but, as everybody knows, they
were not published until October, so that was well after the period
of the debate. Had they been published earlier they would have
been a very important part of the evidence for the debate. There
is no perfect time to conduct a debate like this because there
is always additional evidence going to come along. I think you
would be right to conclude with hindsight that this timing was
imperfect. You also asked me about self-criticism of the role
of the Steering Board and myself in the process and I can be very
frank on this. There were certain things over which we had no
control and there is a question as to whether we should have gone
ahead on that basis. I say today that I accept complete responsibility,
I am the person whose neck is on the block. I think that with
hindsight and with more time we could have made much more use
of the six weeks with more advance planning and an ability to
ensure that we had properly anticipated the level of demand for
people to attend these meetings, but we had not. We had not expected
anything like 600 meetings. I have to confess, we had expected
something like 100 or 200, which would have been a stunning success
for us, but 600 was beyond our comprehension and, in fact, when
we were given that figure by COI we insisted on double checking
it to make certain that it had credibility and, indeed, it had.
Q50 Alan Simpson: I take it that
you would be advising us to look carefully at the sequencing of
similar debates and consultations. Can I move on to my second
reservation about your own role vis a" vis the responsibilities
to the public. I came across quite a large amount of criticism
about the paucity of the briefings. That was not necessarily about
taking a position on the areas that were under scientific dispute
but at least being honest about what was in dispute, so in terms
of the background information for the public were you really happy
that what you said had nothing that addressed issues about horizontal
gene transfer, about the hot spots in terms of growth promoters
within the technology itself, which is open to quite serious scientific
dispute, about issues relating to antibiotic marker resistance,
issues of long-term contamination. All of those appear to be singularly
absent from an offer of what it was that was under dispute. I
am really concerned that these were issues that invariably came
up at all the meetings that I was at but did not figure in the
background briefings that you offered the public.
Professor Grant: I would go further.
Q51 Alan Simpson: I have always been
too modest in my criticism.
Professor Grant: I think the criticism
of the briefing material, and indeed the whole toolkit, was not
just the content, although there was an issue around how much
you could load into this without it becoming top heavy, but it
was our ambition that this should be stimulus material and in
the end "stimulus" was not the word that you would apply
to it. It started as being highly stimulating material because
we had gone out to our various stakeholders and asked them to
provide it to us and we were preparing a document which brought
in all the stakeholders so those who were advancing all of these
arguments and positions would have a say in what appeared. However,
we then used a firm to try to help us to put it into plain and
simple English, it was a communication of science exercise, if
you like, and it came out of that process rather naked and stripped
of the passion that it had had when it had gone in. By this stage
we were faced, I am afraid, with the dilemma of do we pull the
plug on it altogether or do we go ahead with what we have got.
Since we had expressed right from the beginning that one of the
objectives was to at least to pour information into the public
domain to allow people to have a basis for discussion we had no
choice but to go ahead with it. Can I just stress to you in preparing
this information the pull factor that was exerted throughout all
of this. These are hotly contested issues and I can show you the
e-mail traffic that we endured during that process. It was very
fortunate that we were able to get anything out at the end at
all and I think probably a fairly good reason for it being rather
anodyne and limited.
Q52 Alan Simpson: In a way that is
exactly what I am uncomfortable about, that that is the nature
of the debate, it has been hotly contested, it is passionately
felt on both sides, but what a lot of people seemed to be raising
in meetings I went to was to understand what it was that was being
argued about. It was the anodyne nature of things that made people
feel the big issues under dispute were actually being slipped
past them. I suppose I am just saying in how you deal with that
e-mail traffic and the disputes, what we ought to learn surely
is not to take the passion out of the information base.
Professor Grant: Our Steering
Board were unanimous about that afterwards. At the time we had
no time to reinject passion and reach unanimous agreement that
this was the toolkit that we could run with.
Q53 Alan Simpson: The other element
that seemed to generate quite a lot of anger was just about the
remit that you work to. It seemed to me that quite a lot of people
were objecting to the framework of the debate insofar as it excluded
fairly fundamental questions, not about toxicity, contamination
or liability but whether these were even the appropriate food
and farming choices that they wanted to address: was this needed;
were there other farming choices? Somehow the technology debate
was cast as the entire stage when, in fact, it was a fragment
of the stage around the sort of food economy that people wish
to live in. Would you accept that none of that came through in
the information base that you had and that ought to be part of
a wider remit that we try to set for people like yourselves in
conducting debates of this nature?
Professor Grant: Certainly I agree
with the latter point. So far as the earlier point is concerned,
there are two answers. First of all, the general framework which
the Government set for the debate was that it was framed in terms
of GM issues, but more particularly we decided that we should
not set the precise parameters, and nor should the Government,
we should take that broad remit and run it across a group of members
of the public through the so-called Foundation Discussion workshops,
and from there work up the issues that they felt were the appropriate
ones for the debate. It was a bottom-up framing exercise which
we felt was intellectually and fundamentally important to the
exercise, even though it may well have meant that some of the
issues that you have raised, which are highly technical in many
respects, escaped from that initial framing process.
Q54 Alan Simpson: Would it have helped
if local authorities and health authorities had actually been
instructed to set up their own debates as part of the national
framework you were to generate debate on?
Professor Grant: Instructing local
authorities is never an easy thing to do. Certainly we had excellent
co-operation from many of them and, indeed, for many of them the
debate is going on. I am speaking at one on Monday run by Hampshire
County Council. The conversation has not finished simply because
we have submitted our report.
Q55 Diana Organ: You have talked
about some of the principal lessons to be learned from having
done this. You have talked about the cost, you have talked about
the timing and the clear objectives that are needed, but you did
say that you were concerned that the broader public reach had
not been successful. A colleague mentioned that there was a meeting
locally for him but it seemed to be in a rather middle class village
hall. You were concerned yourself about the timing and worried
about the universities not being around. You seem to be worried
about middle class villages having access and university professors
being able to go. I just wonder what you would do as a lesson
to be learned to have a broader reach so that we can carry out
these debates so a much broader cross-section of the public could
find it easier to participate?
Professor Grant: I would just
stress that I was not at all interested in university professors.
Q56 Diana Organ: But you mentioned
the timetable was when the university holidays were on.
Professor Grant: The majority
of people in universities are students and they were certainly
a community that I would have wanted to engage. July is the worst
possible time of the year for students.
Diana Organ: They have done their exams
and they are pissed.
Chairman: Sorry, Diana suffers from nostalgia.
Q57 Diana Organ: I have a daughter
at university.
Professor Grant: It is the first
question that has thrown me completely.
Q58 Diana Organ: If you were having
to do this again, what would you do to make it easier for a much
broader cross-section of the public to get involved?
Professor Grant: I think this
involves a lot more work. We did what limited amount we could
but it was more on the basis of an advanced focus group methodology,
in other words bringing in people who had not been exposed to
the issues, putting them through two meetings, giving them the
opportunity between the meetings to think further and to research
further on some of the issues. I think there is an enormously
rich methodology that can be developed during that. That still
does not reach across to the general public, it still does not
give the general public a feeling that they are being engaged
in the debate. We have engaged maybe 40, 50, 60, 70,000 people
in the debate, I do not know how many ultimately, and that is
a remarkable achievement, but you are right to say it is limited
to a smallish group of self-engagers. To get to the other group
I think is an enormous problem. Normally people will engage in
discussions around GM when they are in the supermarket and facing
the shelf and asking themselves what does it mean. Supermarkets
at the moment do not offer them that choice but, in the event
that they were to, that is where people come up against GM as
a real issue. Otherwise, as you have seen, when people came into
our discussion groups when asked to list what issues were worrying
them at that moment, GM was not normally on the list to start
with, it was only when you started picking away at it that it
emerged as an issue.
Chairman: Thank you very much indeed
for giving evidence. If there are points you wish to make when
you reflect upon this then we will be very happy to receive them
and we may wish to come to you for some clarification. You have
been very helpful, thank you.
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