UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 756-v

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION COMMITTEE

 

 

GOVERNING THE FUTURE

 

 

Tuesday 17 October 2006

 

MS JILL RUTTER, JONATHAN PORRITT CBE and

PROFESSOR SUSAN OWENS OBE AcSS FRSA

 

PROFESSOR SIR DAVID KING

Evidence heard in Public Questions 406-514

 

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

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Oral Evidence

Taken before the Public Administration Committee

on Tuesday 17 October 2006

Members present

Dr Tony Wright, in the Chair

Mr David Burrowes

Paul Flynn

Kelvin Hopkins

Julie Morgan

Mr Gordon Prentice

Paul Rowen

Grant Shapps

Jenny Willott

________________

 

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Ms Jill Rutter, Director of Strategy and Sustainable Development, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Jonathan Porritt CBE, Co-Founder and Programme Director of Forum for the Future, Sustainable Development Commission and Professor Susan Owens OBE AcSS FRSA, Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, gave evidence.

Q406 Chairman: Let me call the Committee to order and welcome our witnesses today. Thank you very much indeed for coming. We have Jonathan Porritt from the Sustainable Development Commission, Jill Rutter from Defra and Professor Susan Owens from the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution. Thank you very much for coming to help us with our inquiry on Governing the Future. We are not, if I may just explain, concerned primarily with the content of what you do, but more the process that you are engaged in. What we are interested in is looking at how Government can get to terms with long-term strategic thinking, how they can organise themselves to do that and because you are all involved in that in a variety of ways, we want to hear from you. Do any of you want to say anything by way of a brief introduction?

Jonathan Porritt: We are happy to get into it.

Q407 Chairman: In that case let me then develop that opening remark into a question. People used to refer to NIMBYs and I see now people are starting to refer to NIMTOs, which is Not In My Term of Office. What we are grappling with is how on earth governments who live by electoral cycles, who are inherently short term in the way that they operate, get to grips seriously with some of the issues which we know are inherently long term and probably cause a good deal of grief in the short term if you get hold of them. Is that an inexorable problem for Government or is there a way of handling it? Do you think we are handling it in a reasonable way? Who wants to have a go at that?

Ms Rutter: I am not quite sure that we are really the right people. You might want to call some of your political colleagues. There are obvious, very short-term pressures on ministers and we see that all the time; we experience that in a number of places. I think it is quite interesting compared with when I studied politics at university. Then you assumed that the life term of a government was something like four or five years, you expected governments to change office; certainly those of us who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s expected that. Now governments may feel that they are around for a longer term. The last Conservative Government was around for 17 years, this Government is about to chalk up 10 years so there is now more a sense that governments will probably be around to deal with at least some of the medium-term consequences of early decisions if not the long-term consequences. We are getting better at this. There are some very obvious things to point out. The early decision by the Chancellor to make the Bank of England independent is quite a good example of making an institutional solution to remove one of biases towards the short term. When I was in the Treasury Private Office interest rates were actually the subject of the most vivid short-term politics imaginable, so that was quite an interesting thing to do. By creation of things like the Sustainable Development Commission we are trying to change the incentives set within Government. Think of it as a pay-off matrix. There are very obvious and very positive pay-offs to short-term action, discarding the long term. What we are trying to do is rectify that balance by putting some checks into the system that actually increase your incentives to address long-term issues. The Sustainable Development Commission has three functions. It has an advice-to-government function, an advocacy function, but also, in the last UK sustainable development strategy which the Prime Minister launched last year, it is given a new watchdog function. It is designed deliberately to go out and challenge Government to be thinking longer term, to be applying the principles we set out in the sustainable development strategy. There is an issue back into Parliament about changing that pay-off matrix as well, which is that the scrutiny function of Parliament is very important here and the more that ministers and departments feel they will be held to account for having made decisions in a way that looks to the long term, the more that will increase the incentives set and remove some of the bias towards the shorter term. That is my initial take.

Q408 Chairman: Thank you for kicking us off.

Jonathan Porritt: It is very difficult and I must say my heart sinks when I hear politicians describe something as a long-term problem. I am very nervous about any government minister who says climate change, for instance, is the greatest long-term problem that we face because I know that sneaking in "long term" at that point is in fact a declaration of NIMTO and it is a problem at that point because you know action will get deferred. Government have a number of ways in which they can overcome that. They can set long-term targets and then seek to build incremental change processes towards the destination that that target gives you. They can, rarely but quite importantly, build cross-party consensus so that it is not as vulnerable to potential change of Government as it would be otherwise. It can, as Jill said, go in for some institutional reform to bring new elements, new energy to bear on the short-term problems and give them a longer lease, a longer attention span than might otherwise be the case in the short-term cut and thrust of parliamentary democracy. It does have a number of mechanisms for doing this. It has to be said, at the moment in our neck of the woods, sustainable development, which obviously has this uniquely complex inter-generational issue requiring people to think about the future generation explicitly as well as to deal with the issues of the current generation, they all remain as difficult to handle with that cross-temporal dimension as it has ever been.

Q409 Chairman: Does the proposal for a climate change bill, for example, bridge that gap that you are describing, in so far as it seeks to convert what people say about the long term into some serious annual commitments?

Jonathan Porritt: I am not sure whether the proposal for a bill as such will do that but the requirement that Government should provide a transparent journey towards the destination defined by the target is critical and in a way the Government have done that up to 2010, then they have taken this huge leap through to 2050 which has left this great yawning expanse of something between 2010 and 2050, largely uncharacterised by a sense of where policy is going to take us. This is not just bad for the Government, it is very bad for the business community and intriguingly what we see more and more of is progressive companies coming to business in a quite uncharacteristic role and saying "We understand that we have to do a lot more in terms of much bigger investments in carbon-friendly technologies and processes, but you cannot, you absolutely cannot expect us to do that unless we know what the investment climate is going to be like in 2015, 2020, because otherwise you are asking us to put shareholders' assets at risk without providing us with that transparency through the appropriate timeframe".

Professor Owens: One of the most fascinating things to observe is the way in which government and policy norms do change over time and they change quite dramatically. If one thinks back to the 1970s when the environment was emerging as a major political issue, the sorts of legislation and institutions that we had then were very, very different from the ones that we have now. Somehow over those decades governments have changed and they have adapted to longer-term priorities. It is a process that one political scientist calls the process of enlightenment and in a way governments, because they are so much subject to all the short-term pressures that we know about, need somehow to put themselves under longer-term pressures to take longer-term things into account. For example, setting up bodies that will give independent advice to governments is one such measure, even if that advice is very unwelcome at particular points in time. It has to be said that governments need to be open to all the sorts of challenges that they are subject to in pluralist democracies and not to close off some of the channels for those sorts of challenges from pressure groups, planning systems and so on.

Ms Rutter: May I just add that another source of long-term targets is certainly very significant for environmental policy which is through our EU obligations. We have 2010 targets on landfill, we have targets under the Water Framework Directive going out to 2015 and beyond, so that is a source of targets which impose constraints on the Government and the EU has infractions procedures it can invoke if the Government do not meet those targets which is a bit different from the targets that the Government could impose on itself through a climate change bill of the sort Friends of the Earth are proposing.

Q410 Chairman: What about this inherent problem that people have put to us that we always get the long term wrong? We might ambitiously set out to do long-term thinking but in fact we always get the projections wrong and people have given us examples of this. There is someone here citing the 1949 Royal Commission on Population which asserts that the total population of Great Britain will reach a maximum around about 1977 and will thereafter begin a slow decline. If you had planned public policy on that basis, you would have got into all kinds of trouble. So is there not something inherently difficult about doing this big strategic thinking?

Jonathan Porritt: Yes; clearly. However, the kind of practice that one would most recommend in that context is to go in the first instance for a series of what are sometimes described as no-regrets interventions. So almost whatever the case as these social trends, economic trends, environmental trends move through the system, whatever the case, a no-regrets policy approach means that you are not going to end up with egg on your face at whatever point you get to. I feel that the no-regrets approach to this, which is often talked about by politicians but rarely introduced in the way that it might be, as actively as it might be, would be a great aid to governments as they, quite rightly, experience some of the uncertainties associated with what is going to be happening in 2030, 2040, 2050. There are certain instances, however, where the scientific evidence is really so strong that to use residual uncertainty as an excuse for persistent procrastination is just dishonest politics and the science of climate change has now reached the point where the global procrastination of leaders is inexcusable in that respect, morally as well as politically inexcusable and, if Nick Stone is right, possibly even economically inexcusable, but we shall wait to see what is in that particular report.

Q411 Chairman: One further question about machinery. I do not think the Committee realised until it looked abroad that we were world leaders in all this. We went to Finland because we thought Finland was the great leader in all this and Finland told us that we were the great leader in all this. We have discovered all these bits of machinery which sit doing this sort of work, much of it wholly unknown to the general public let alone to people like us, which is interesting, is it not? Yet the question that arises is: does all this make sense? Is there coherence in it? Do we set up new bodies because it looks good to set up new bodies as opposed to developing existing machinery? There seems to be a huge number of people operating in this area. We have a Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution (RCEP). I do not know how many people in this country know that there is a Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, but I should think virtually nobody, which is interesting as you have been going for 30-odd years. Then we have a Sustainable Development Commission (SDC) more recently set up. I do not know quite where you end and the Sustainable Development Commission starts, but I see now we have a proposal to set up an Office for Climate Change and I cannot work out what they are going to do that is different from what you are doing. So we are world leaders, but are we not in a bit of muddle?

Ms Rutter: The slightly Topsy-like picture is partly a result of heritage. The RCEP produces some very distinguished reports and while people out there may not know of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, when the RCEP produces a serious long-term, very evidence-based report that does get picked up and that does help inform debate. RCEP are just doing a study now, which we are looking forward to, on the urban environment; certainly within Defra that has caused us to think differently about the way in which we look at environmental issues. The RCEP report on long-term targets was actually the origin of the 60 per cent target that made its way into the Energy White Paper. The SDC grew out of the sustainable development round table that was set up in the first UK sustainable development strategy and is there in a different role. In a sense its external profile is less significant than its profile in Government because the SDC's first function is to act as the Government's critical friend and to act as an adviser and a capacity builder to Government. In a sense you could say that should be done within Defra, but we slightly feel that other government departments would prefer to look to a slightly external body and indeed contract with the SDC to do specific work for them rather than to invite in my team in Defra to go to help them when they know actually it may come up to a Cabinet Committee debate in which Defra ministers may be taking a different view. That is what the SDC does and where it fits. The Office for Climate Change is addressing another and separate issue which is when he became Secretary of State for the Environment - and this probably goes into his experience at ODPM as then was - David Miliband felt that ministers needed a capacity for analysis that worked to them, not worked to Jonathan but worked very much to them, so that they could find a space to look at climate change issues which do not fall usefully into departmental silos. That is what the OCC, which is not going to be very big, is going to do. We already announced, when it was launched on the 21 September, that its first piece of work is to do a strategic audit across the piece and where the PMSU does strategic audits to look at where we are doing okay, where we do need to start catching up, that will then generate a series of projects, like PMSU projects in some ways, sponsored by ministers to whom the OCC report. It is very much a ministerial capacity think-tank around climate change issues.

Professor Owens: In a way these different bodies occupy a different niche in the advisory system. The Royal Commission was quite a good example of long-term thinking by Harold Wilson who set it up in 1970 specifically with a remit to take a very in-depth and long-term view of environmental issues. It was quite visionary to set it up as a standing body because standing bodies do not just report once and go away, they nag and they come back and they say "You did not take notice of our recommendations" and so on. Whilst I think you are right that the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution is probably not a household name in the UK, it is a very well-known body amongst the relevant policy communities in the environmental field and the reports may be known to people even though they would not necessarily be able to tell you exactly who produced them. One thing that emerges from a long-standing body with partly a watchdog role, partly a brief to go where ministers will not go at particular points in time, is that it comes out with sets of principles. You were asking earlier how we plan for the long term when things constantly change and we do not predict certain social changes or economic changes, but it seems to me that to be able to articulate certain sets of principles which govern , for example, environmental policies, is very important. Over the years the Royal Commission has either promoted or articulated for the first time some very important principles such as the duty of care in waste management, integrated pollution control and it promoted the precautionary principle which has really changed the way we think about the environment in the long term. Yes, you are right, it is not a household name but over time it nevertheless influences ideas in a way that changes the frame for environmental policy and that is a very important long-term function as opposed to the more immediate watchdog function over whether Government are implementing their current policies according to sustainable development principles.

Jonathan Porritt: We are at one on this. I actually do not think this is an area where Government are muddled. Respective remits that the Royal Commission has had and the Sustainable Development Commission has had and now the Office for Climate Change, are very clear in fact and not least because we are not an environmental commission, we are a Sustainable Development Commission. That means that we spend at least as much time concerning ourselves with the business of DCLG, DfES, the Department of Health, with the Treasury, Department for Transport, DTI as we do with Defra. Just to be absolutely clear about it, our sponsoring department is in fact the Cabinet Office; it just happens that Defra pays for most of the Sustainable Development Commission. Theoretically it is positioned in the right place and we work therefore across Government because sustainable development is not the same thing as the environment.

Q412 Paul Flynn: I am eager to improve my incentive set. I have only just discovered that I have one, but I am sure it is defective. As the Chairman pointed out, it came as something of a surprise to us to realise that in the business of the future forecasting we are really something of an exemplar in Europe when very few of us are actually aware of this. Ms Rutter, you mentioned the need for parliamentary scrutiny. What parliamentary scrutiny do you have now?

Ms Rutter: The sustainable development strategy is picked up by the Environmental Audit Committee who call Defra quite often to account for what is going on in this. We are quite keen that the Environmental Audit Committee should actually see its role as calling departments to account. It does not make much sense to call me in to ask, for example, why a school building programme is not necessarily being built to the best whole-life costing principles. It makes much more sense to ask DfES, as an example. So we have the Environmental Audit Committee. When he came to the launch of the Sustainable Procurement Taskforce, another independent time-limited committee that we set up but which is now wound up, Stephen Timms made it clear that the Treasury would be reminding the Committee of Public Accounts, which is extremely important if we are talking about the incentive sets, not so much of ministers but certainly of permanent secretaries, that they should be scrutinising for long-term value for money not just for short-term cash. So Treasury are completely on board with that; that is after all what the Green Book sets of rules say. It would be interesting to have some parliamentary debates about sustainable development issues. It was very noticeable when you published the sustainable development strategy that, although it was launched by the Prime Minister, it did not get picked up in Parliament at all, although we announced it to Parliament and it is obviously published as a Command Paper. It would be quite interesting if individual parliamentary committees also picked up some of the principles that all departments are committed to through the SD strategy and actually benchmarked the policies that ministers come to speak about against those principles.

Q413 Paul Flynn: So you have the Environmental Audit Committee, a greatly respected committee that does very serious work, but it does not apply to any of the other select committees, or is it an aspiration that we should have a debate on this, because we do not, do we? It is confined to the Environmental Audit Committee and there is nothing happening by way of scrutiny review by any other select committee or in parliamentary debates. These are extremely rare.

Ms Rutter: Not in a systematic way. Obviously, we have just experienced two debates on climate change or one debate on climate change yesterday and on Monday there was an Opposition day on green taxation.

Q414 Paul Flynn: Did they use your work? Was your work quoted on this?

Ms Rutter: I have not read the Hansards to see. Climate change would basically focus very much on climate change though obviously in the sustainable development strategy climate change is one of the four key things.

Q415 Paul Flynn: Jonathan, is your work under parliamentary scrutiny?

Jonathan Porritt: The Sustainable Development Commission could be subject to parliamentary scrutiny, indeed the Environmental Audit Committee does summon us regularly to talk about the work that we are doing. As to whether we are subject to scrutiny of whether we are doing a good job, no-one has sought to ask that question of us as of now. I am happy to say we have a new performance management framework for the Sustainable Development Commission, so I look forward to being held to account in that way in the near future. Because the Commission has only just taken on this watchdog role, to a certain extent I am not sure that it was deemed to be a sufficiently important part of the machinery, as scrutineers of the machinery might see it, to think about a formal appraisal process, evaluation process of that kind.

Professor Owens: The reports of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution are laid before Parliament as Command Papers and normally they have been debated. Certainly historically there have been some extremely lively debates about Royal Commission reports. Governments respond to them formally as a document usually and those tend to get debated as well, so it has sometimes given rise to a great deal of parliamentary interest. The work of the Commission itself is subject to quinquennial review as a public body and in fact we are about to be reviewed again.

Q416 Paul Flynn: What you are all up against as bodies that produce reports which are based on evidence, based on objectives that are scientific are other organs of persuasion, those that are based on greed and self-interest and all those bodies that can employ lobbyists and others to get the ear of politicians. Are you not hopelessly out-gunned in the battle for the attention of politicians?

Professor Owens: As a Royal Commission we of course take evidence as well, so we hear from many groups in the course of all of our studies. We tend to hear from all of the interest groups involved, so that is quite an interesting process. We take evidence from many different perspectives and then we try to distil that into our studies. They are not purely scientific studies. The Royal Commission has many natural scientists as members but also people from a wide range of other disciplines. It brings a number of different perspectives to bear.

Jonathan Porritt: No, we are not out-gunned. I feel in a way that a body like the Sustainable Development Commission has an opportunity to present its evidence and its work to Government in a way that no external lobbying body can do. We are given an inside track in that respect. We are able to bring that advice to bear through direct meetings with ministers, with senior officials in every department. However good a lobbying organisation may be, they have to work quite hard to secure that. I have heard it is sometimes the case, but on the whole I should like to think that a formal advisory body like the SDC actually is given better and impartial access of that kind by Government. I do not have any complaints about the degree to which the Commission is able to use our remit.

Q417 Paul Flynn: Could I give you a specific example? There was a recent change of view by the Prime Minister on the future of nuclear power and I believe your view would be that it was too expensive and it had no part in our energy programme. That was changed. Do you think that was changed entirely by the weight of objective scientific opinion or were there other forces involved in that that were more powerful than perhaps the view that you take?

Jonathan Porritt: I feel loath to second guess why any individual in Government might change his position on nuclear power.

Q418 Paul Flynn: You are amongst friends.

Jonathan Porritt: I would say quite upfront that the Sustainable Development Commission, who spent two years looking at nuclear power, produced a report that was generally extremely well received by Government, even if it was not what Government wanted to hear. That is certainly true because by that stage, you are right, the prevailing weight of opinion and judgment inside Government had started to move towards nuclear power but our report, which said that that was probably the wrong way to go, was not dismissed, indeed it is referenced a lot in the Energy Review and has been taken account of. Again, you may be surprised at this, I cannot honestly complain about that. In a parliamentary system, advisers to Government do their best to offer the best advice they possibly can. If Government see fit then to ignore it in the way they move policy forward, well so be it in that regard. At that point the Commission has done its job as an advisory body, our evidence, our reports, will be used and taken up by other people and we see them being used as much by NGOs as perhaps by dissenting bodies inside Government. I notice the Parliamentary Labour Party is occasionally mentioning the Sustainable Development Commission's report, well so be it. That is the way the system works. A lot of what the Commission, the SDC, said in that report - I hope this does not sound too arrogant, I certainly do not mean it to - will be borne out in the difficulties that the Government would have, should it choose proactively to seek to bring forward a renewed nuclear power programme.

Q419 Paul Flynn: May I ask Ms Rutter a similar question about a particular subject I believe you have studied about the future of farming and so on? If you were bold enough to suggest, for instance, that in a future outbreak of foot and mouth, which is one of the areas you have looked at, farmers should insure themselves against losses and actually pay compensation, which was something suggested by an ex-minister recently, if that came up from your body, what chance do you think that you could get that through against the might of the farming lobby? Do you think there would be a public debate on equal terms or any terms on which you had a hope of winning?

Ms Rutter: I am obviously slightly different from Jonathan and Susan because I sit within Defra and we have some policies. We have a sustainable food and farming strategy which was developed by a commission under Sir Don Curry involving representatives of the farming industry and environmentalists and Graham Wynne from the RSPB is still there as a big player on the Curry Group. Any strategy of that sort about moving to greater farmer responsibility would have to be developed in conjunction and in dialogue with the industry. That is the way in which something like that would be done as a way in which my colleagues would do it. The people who would be doing it would be people who lead on our farming policy in our sustainable food and farming DG.

Q420 Paul Flynn: One of the suggestions that has been made and one of the reasons for this inquiry is that there are other parliaments, principally in Finland and in Israel, that have committees on the future - committee of the future in one case - that look at all legislation and in one case all the policies in terms of someone living in 25 years' time, 50 years' time or 100 years' time and that would involve politicians and one hoped would extend their horizons beyond the date of the next election. Do you think this would be useful? Would it be useful to you in your work? Would be useful in announcing the reports that you produce?

Ms Rutter: We are probably very interested in whether you conclude that this is a very useful device. We have been talking and we did a bit of work last year thinking about how we should start thinking about the future. One of the suggestions that did come up, and the SDC might be doing something similar to that, was the creation of a council for the future. We are very aware that when you launch a policy you do listen to the people who have a stake in the status quo. It is quite interesting, if you think about the way in which we do regulatory impact assessments, that you are very much doing it as a static analysis of the effects on business as constructed now, whereas if you are saying we actually need to shift to much less energy-intensive sorts of business or sorts of ways of doing things, you are creating winners and losers but in the current state losers obviously are quite strongly there. So it would be very interesting to find out from Curry whether these Finnish models, and Norway has done something where it looked at what the world would look like in 2030 and tested the robustness of their current systems, whether these things really do change things. We think the SDC does have potential to add value, both through its external role but also, much more importantly, through this inside track role of going in and talking through issues and doing work for departments and helping them think through a range of issues bringing some external challenge inside in quite a safe sort of way. I am quite interested to know whether it works or not but, as your Chairman said, the slightly scary thing is that we are deemed to be more forward thinking than many other places, which is quite a nice place to be, but it is also quite an uncomfortable place to be because you would like to know that there are a lot of better off-the-shelf models you could go and recruit in.

Professor Owens: There is of course the horizon scanning strategy within government departments which is quite an interesting way of trying to look forward to the future, but I wonder to what extent some of the challenges have to be independent of Government and from outside it. You asked us a few moments ago for examples of where the recommendations of particular bodies had been successful or not successful and the one comment I would make there is that it matters enormously what timescale you look at in that context. If we look at whether recommendations have direct hits in the sense of being taken up immediately by Government, we very often find that that is not the case, but if we look over a longer period, maybe 10 or 15 or perhaps even 20 years, we see that some of the ideas and recommendations that bodies are bringing forward gradually percolate into the thinking of policy-makers and have an impact much later. The example of integrated pollution control that I mentioned earlier was a very, very classic one. It took seven years for the then Government to say no to the Royal Commission's ideas and it took another 15 for them actually to be implemented in practice, whereas when the Royal Commission recommended that lead be phased out of petrol, that chimed with the Government's dilemma at that time and it was accepted within an hour. The timing of acceptance varies but an independent challenge is very important.

Q421 Paul Flynn: I thought there was a recommendation in 1983 that lead be phased out of petrol.

Professor Owens: It was and that recommendation was accepted very, very quickly because the Government were in difficulties over that issue.

Q422 Paul Flynn: Indeed. Jonathan, do we need a committee? Do we need parliamentarians looking at this?

Jonathan Porritt: I do not know.

Q423 Paul Flynn: Okay. Could you just tell me briefly what is the most valuable recommendation you have made in your bodies?

Professor Owens: One or several.

Q424 Chairman: We only have time for one.

Professor Owens: The Royal Commission's recommendation in 2000 that we move towards a 60 per cent reduction in CO₂ emissions, an important long-term one.

Jonathan Porritt: We presented a lot of evidence to Government on the need for a sustainable food and farming strategy just after we were set up and helped define what sustainable farming means as represented in government sustainable farming strategy today. You will see our words at the front of that strategy and again, perhaps to your surprise, I actually think the government policy on farming and food has moved far more in that direction than the NFU might ever like you to believe and is actually much closer to where a body like ours sits than it is to where some perhaps more backward-looking voices in the farming community might want it to sit.

Q425 Chairman: I do not think Ms Rutter can have a favourite.

Ms Rutter: I do not think I can.

Q426 Jenny Willott: I just wanted to come to the implementation, the practical side of it. This would apply to all three of you really. How do you make sure that recommendations and the thinking that is going on in your organisations and your units actually make the difference to decision-making and policy development within Defra and other government departments? Does it make a difference and how?

Jonathan Porritt: Jill is in such a different position because Jill is the Civil Service in this respect, who are bringing all the advice to ministers through a conventional government decision-making process. Although we work very closely with the sustainable development unit which is part of Jill's division in Defra, our route into Government is completely different because clearly we are not a bit of Defra and we are not a bit of Government like that; we are a non-departmental public body bringing advice into Government from outside, albeit often on an inside track. I know that is a bit confusing. We would seek whatever mechanism we possibly could to get access to relevant parts of the system at the relevant times. To give you an example which is at the top of my mind at the moment, the Government's Department for Communities and Local Government is about to produce a Government White Paper. We have been working on an inside track basis with the DCLG, we have been able to share some of the ideas and thoughts in that. We have been able to advise Ruth Kelly directly, we have been talking to officials for the last six months. That is what we are able to do and to bring all of our interests around sustainable communities and all of that piece to bear on that very important government process right now. That is totally different from Defra's interface with DCLG during this White Paper process which is all done by the usual official exchanges that you would expect.

Q427 Jenny Willott: Do you feel that the longer term that you are bringing out in the work that you have been doing in the Commission is having an influence and is making a difference in the decisions that are being made within departments?

Jonathan Porritt: By virtue of us being this body charged with a longer-term remit - we have not quite been given a remit that we have to work out the implications for the seventh generation, which is the Iroquois Confederation's approach to long-term thinking, that if you cannot work out what the implication is for the seventh generation, then it is a bad decision. We have not quite been asked to do that but we have clearly been given a very strong long-term remit. The truth of it is, and I am being absolutely blunt, that we do not bring blue-sky recommendations, long-term blue-sky recommendations to Government unless we can make the connection between what needs to be done in the short term, in the medium term and through to the long term. When we were looking at the role of Government in managing carbon in the economy, we brought forward a recommendation about personal carbon allowances which is undoubtedly what might be described as quite a long-term suggestion, although the Secretary of State in Defra is very interested in that, but we put in place before that a number of interim steps that needed to be made.

Q428 Jenny Willott: May I ask two different things really? The first is how the work that you do links into and informs decision-making and policy-making within Defra? Then I want to ask some questions about relationships outside Defra as well.

Ms Rutter: I have three divisions working for me, one of which is the Defra strategy unit, one of which is the sustainable development unit and one of which is a new team which we have set up particularly looking at issues around sustainable communities to try to coordinate Defra input around Barker, the housing growth agenda and things like that. Concentrating particularly on the strategy unit in which I think you are interested, where do we sit? Basically it is a very small unit, the smallest of my units, it is six or seven people - I just lost one yesterday - so it is a slightly hand-to-mouth existence. We do quite a lot of coordination. As you know from the letter to the Prime Minister that David wrote on the 10 July, David Miliband is doing what we are calling a strategy refresh process. We are taking the Defra five-year strategy and having a look again and asking whether, against the sharpened challenge around climate change, our policies are actually ambitious enough. We are looking at key areas. One of our key roles within Defra is not to get engaged in the day-to-day business of policy management, but to challenge people, particularly around prioritisation but also around a degree of ambition. That is what we are doing and the other thing we are doing which is quite important in a department like Defra and Defra has moved on enormously since its creation in 2001 - remember it was created out of heritage MAFF, parts of the Department of the Environment - is that we are also trying to make sure that Defra knits together in a much more effective and powerful way and I think it has moved on enormously. When I was in Number 10 in the 1990s trying to do the first UK sustainable development strategy, the Department could not get to play ball at all and you will notice a big lacuna in the 1994 strategy is that it does not mention agriculture, because MAFF would not even offer anything. Other departments did not necessarily offer very much but MAFF refused to participate full stop. So that has moved on tremendously with the integration of former MAFF into whatever. So we are trying to bring things together. We are particularly surfacing up issues and we work very closely with David Miliband and his advisers to ask whether this is taking the Department in total where we want to go. That is our role, rather than getting involved in the day-to-day policy. We do not go out and negotiate things in Europe, whatever. The other bit of work that we lead on within the Department is the parts of the CSR, the Comprehensive Spending Review, that are looking at the next round of public service agreements. We did work in SRO4 on that, but looking forward the Treasury is having a fundamental look both at the PSA system but also at the strategic outcomes which we are trying to aim at as a department. Our Defra five-year strategy went beyond the set of PSAs that we inherited to say that these are the 14 strategic outcomes we want to deliver as a department and we are going through that process of refining it to meet the new sets of ministerial priorities. So that is what we do within the Department.

Q429 Jenny Willott: One of the other organisations that we have had evidence about is the Number 10 strategy unit and they seem to have a finger in every single pie they can. How do you divide the issues between the Department and the work that they do in Number 10? Have you ever asked them to do something for you? Have they ever asked you to contribute to something they have been doing? Are there tensions, are there problems in the relationship between the two areas of work?

Ms Rutter: I am going to say something which is my own view, which is not a Defra view, not a government view. My view is that the PMSU is a very good thing. When I was at Number 10, you noticed the lack of a brain at the centre. The Cabinet Office interpreted its role very much as a secretariat function. You would go to meetings in the Cabinet Office and sit there for hours. I was a civil servant in the Number 10 Policy Unit and you would sit there and you would get papers going to ministers which were very much, to be fair, lowest common denominator, pasting together - we did not have the technology to do pasting then - of departmental positions and actually did not offer ministers a very good service, did not offer the Cabinet Office a very good service, it certainly did not offer the Prime Minister a very good service. I think it was a good idea to create the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit and it has done some very, very useful work for Defra which has informed decision-making. It was before my time, but the net benefits report looking at the future of the fishing industry, where PMSU, working with Defra, spent a year throwing quite a lot of people at quite an intractable problem and came up with interesting and different solutions which Defra on its own would not have generated, was a very useful process. My concern in a sense is that the PMSU does not do more. There are some very interesting lessons which might come out of the devolved administration. The strategy unit in the Welsh Assembly takes the manifesto that the Government have been elected on and turns it into a corporate plan for Government. That is a quite interesting possible role for PMSU. Their strategic audit work has been useful in highlighting sets of issues. It is wrong to characterise it as this great tension between departmental strategy units and the PMSU.

Q430 Jenny Willott: I was not suggesting that there was, I was asking whether there was.

Ms Rutter: No, there is not.

Q431 Jenny Willott: Going back to the first question. How do you actually liaise? How do you decide what the issues are?

Ms Rutter: It is not a question of liaising. If they are looking at a subject which you ---

Q432 Jenny Willott: Do you know in advance if they are looking at a subject that is in your area?

Ms Rutter: You would do. One of my frustrations is that none of our issues is currently on PMSU's radar.

Q433 Jenny Willott: Can you ask them to put things on?

Ms Rutter: We can ask them, but obviously the PMSU is directed at the Prime Minister, so their work programme is governed very much from the centre of Number 10.

Q434 Jenny Willott: But you can make suggestions.

Ms Rutter: We can make suggestions, but obviously it is the centre that decides the work programme for PMSU.

Q435 Jenny Willott: Do they ask you for input when they are doing something on your area?

Ms Rutter: If it is something that is relevant to your area, yes.

Q436 Jenny Willott: They will ask you.

Ms Rutter: Yes, they will be very keen to get input.

Q437 Jenny Willott: One final question which is just that I gather in Defra there are likely to be spending cuts in the future. How do you think that is going to impact on strategic planning? Do you think it is going to be the first area to go?

Ms Rutter: It makes prioritisation all the more important and that is really what we are trying to do through the strategy.

Q438 Jenny Willott: That is not what I asked. I might agree with that as an answer but it is not the answer to my question.

Ms Rutter: What we are trying to do is to prioritise. One of the areas where Defra is coming up on the side rails is evaluation. We have quite a lot of programmes, but we have not evaluated the effectiveness of our policy interventions as ruthlessly as we should have done and as we come under increasing spending pressure, actually ensuring that what we are doing is really focusing on getting the biggest impact in our key areas, plus ensuring that actually what we do is as effective as it can be, becomes increasingly important. That is a big area of the work.

Jonathan Porritt: May I just add one tiny word on behalf of the advisory bodies who are not here, who would undoubtedly be telling you that their work will be profoundly affected by the cuts in Defra and they would also say, I have no doubt because they have certainly been saying this to others, that some of the long-term work they do will be affected. If one looks for instance at flood defence, which is in the public eye, cuts in that area will clearly have an impact. An area that is less well known, for which Natural England has had responsibility for many years now is sites of special scientific importance and, without a great deal of fuss, they have been gradually moving towards a quite ambitious target for improving the condition of sites of special scientific importance. That work will certainly be slowed. Some of the long-term stuff will get de-prioritised to enable the short-term stuff to be dealt with.

Q439 Jenny Willott: Can you see that happening?

Jonathan Porritt: Not yet, but I have no doubt that if you wrote directly to Natural England they would tell you that is what is going to happen because they do not at the moment seem to be slow in coming forward, pointing out to the Secretary of State and Defra that this is going to have a very big impact on their work.

Q440 Grant Shapps: Briefly then, back to the issue of policy and politics and long-term planning, Jonathan Porritt you were co-chair of the Green Party from 1980, so it has taken over a quarter of a century to get some kind of consensus which may well lead to a bill next month being announced in the Queen's speech to do something serious about the problems of CO₂. What does that tell us about long-term strategy and planning in Government?

Jonathan Porritt: It tells you that patience is a very fine quality and that one needs an awful lot of it in this business. It also tells us something which, to be fair - I hope my Green Party colleagues will not be cross with me for saying this - is that a lot of what we were saying in the 1970s and 1980s was based largely on instinct and not on empirical data and the increase in scientific information - I am sure that David King coming after us will comment on this - the increase in the data available to Government now is absolutely enormous. Whereas delay and uncertainty could conceivably have been argued as a reasonable government response up to the point of course when Mrs Thatcher in her short-lived green period in 1988, when she declared, to our consternation "We are all friends of the earth now" up to that moment the lack of hard scientific data was probably a reasonable justification for not doing as much as should be done. Now there is absolutely no justification and the contradictions therefore that you find at the heart of Government when they try to make a long-term target work in the short term, and I would evidence the aviation strategy, the Aviation White Paper that this Government have, and the Government have been told by many bodies including ourselves that they will not be able to deliver on the Aviation White Paper if they want to deliver on climate change. These two things are fundamentally and totally incompatible, but the short-term aviation pressures are deemed to be more important than moving incrementally towards the long-term 60 per cent target.

Q441 Grant Shapps: Now that we are all friends of the earth, it begs the question whether you do actually require all the parties to be in agreement before policy actually can move forward. Is that not the lesson of your quarter of a century battle, that it has taken all this time to get everyone saying the same thing and therefore this bill is ---

Jonathan Porritt: Political consensus is very important and although I do not believe, as was once suggested, that we could stop the environment being a political football. It is a highly politicised area of concern and even if all the parties sign up to some consensus about a long-term target, the means by which we get there will need to be painstakingly negotiated between different parts of the political system, different parties and different agents of change in that system. I do believe that consensus is important, I believe that needs to be based on good scientific evidence and I have to say that that is now what is undoubtedly driving this increased readiness and sense of purposefulness that you see in all the parties.

Q442 Grant Shapps: I think what you are saying is that actually the parties would have been wrong to ... No, your hunch was correct, they would have been right to, but it would not have been based on scientific evidence if they had listened to you in 1980, for example, so you are almost conceding they were right to delay the decision.

Jonathan Porritt: They obviously were not right, as history now tells us, but they were justified in not having as incisive and strategic a set of commitment as is now required. From 1988 onwards, when my predecessor body informed the Conservative Government that this was no longer an issue of vague hypothesis but was a real phenomenon unfolding in real time in our lives, from that point on Government's delay and prevarication have been completely unjustifiable and in my opinion wilfully neglecting their responsibilities to this and future generations.

Professor Owens: May I add a small comment and that is that it takes many different things to make policy change and if it had not been for the sorts of pressures that were emerging 25 years ago, it probably would not have been on the agenda and therefore we would not now have the kind of scientific information and scientific input that we do have. It is a process where many different threads come together and it does take a lot of time.

Q443 Mr Prentice: Do we need direct action? My question is really about the kind of policy community. You are talking about climate change, but perhaps it would do more to move things on if people out there started taking direct action in some form.

Professor Owens: Direct action often has the effect of drawing something to public and political attention and is one of the forces which bring things together in a way that leads to policy change. It seems to me that having things on the agenda is tremendously important and sometimes the pronouncements of various august bodies do not actually put things on the agenda as much as something that is newsworthy. We have a number of examples from the past.

Q444 Mr Prentice: I want to ask you about that because the Royal Commission has been there since 1970 and you told us in your note that you return to issues if progress has not been made. I just wondered whether you could give us one or two examples where the Royal Commission has actually returned to an issue because the Government is just not interested.

Professor Owens: Yes, I can give you many examples but I shall confine myself to three. The original recommendation that pollution control should be integrated was an issue that the Commission returned to in several reports and also, through another way in which it exerts influence behind the scenes, by talking to people, by persuading people, by pressing this issue inside Whitehall and Parliament over a period of about 10 or 15 years it did really push that issue up the political agenda. That was one example. Another one which was very important was that from its earliest days the Royal Commission was very keen that there should be public access to environmental information and when it first began to press that point, it fell very much on deaf ears and over the years it pressed it in successive reports and always rejected the argument that public access to environmental information would somehow be dangerous and would lead to irresponsibility; it rejected that successively, so that was another example. One final one, the Royal Commission produced a major study on transport and the environment in 1994 and many of the issues that it raised then have become conventional wisdom since, but it came back several years later, it was either 1997 or 1998, to produce another report on transport and to say they had not done enough, these issues were still crucial.

Q445 Mr Prentice: That is very interesting. Perhaps I could just ask Jonathan Porritt whether the Government do enough to get the views of people outside the loop. There are people who have alternative futures; Swampy who is going up a tree to stop a road being built and people thinking about policy in the Department for Transport have a different vision of the future. I am just interested in the extent to which Government seek out people who have a different idea of what the future may look like and try to learn from them.

Jonathan Porritt: It differs from department to department. Some departments are very open to those stakeholder voices and in fact very heavily dependent on them for a diversity of views and a quite differentiated spectrum from radical to conservative views which, in my experience, although sometimes you do not see that reflected in policy as it emerges, is usually deemed to be helpful to the policy-making process. That openness has improved in the last few years. If I think back to a time when I was in Friends of the Earth and as Director of Friends of the Earth was trying to bring policy in from outside, mostly at that time doors were closed because we were not deemed to have anything terribly useful to say. I certainly do not see that now. NGOs in our field, or at least in the environmental field, seem to get reasonably easy access to practically anyone they want to quite quickly when they have something to say. They may get sent away without anything being said and things do not necessarily change because they have got access.

Q446 Mr Prentice: That is the point.

Jonathan Porritt: It is part of the point, but you cannot say that there is not a listening process going on. You definitely cannot say that.

Q447 Mr Prentice: I am also interested in where there is a clash of strategies and I am looking at Jill Rutter here. Jenny asked you about the Number 10 Strategy Unit. Are there any examples? I should like some examples where the strategies of different departments are pulling in opposite directions and how that is resolved.

Ms Rutter: That would be resolved through the normal strategy policies. Obviously, individual policy decisions are made collectively by ministers. All significant policy decisions go to the relevant Cabinet committee which will have the relevant secretary of state on it; they will go in and have to, in the normal way of things, reconcile the varying policy demands. In a sense this clash idea, these wars of strategies, is not quite right. I will put it the other way. One of the shortcomings of the process around five-year strategies was the lack of integration. Rather than saying there is this strategy war between strategies going in different directions, that process, because it was done department by department, you were either a first wave or a second wave, there were a lot of missed opportunities where you felt that those strategies could have linked up better. So it was less that things were going in different directions than that you failed to identify opportunities. For example, the work the Department of Health did was focusing on health like that, then you have us focusing on things like climate change, but both of us have a big dimension around change of behaviour. There are actually some issues where we shared similar interventions but actually for different objectives. The Department of Health obesity objectives can also be met by some of the things that we think would be good for local air quality and for climate change, for example getting people out of cars.

Q448 Mr Prentice: My question really is whether the strategy people, all 70 of them, at Number 10 Strategy Unit have primacy. The Prime Minister is painting a picture of a nuclear future. We had an Energy White Paper only three years ago, the one before the latest one, which did not do that and all the factors which the Prime Minister is now calling in aid, the uncertainty of our gas supplies from places like Russia, were known in 2003 and the Prime Minister has done a backward somersault on something as important as nuclear strategy for the country. I am just interested how that happened.

Ms Rutter: I am not really the person who is very well placed to comment on that. The one thing I would say from our perspective is that the whole issue - I have only been in Defra since February 2004 so I was not around for the first Energy White Paper - of energy security has gone up the agenda quite significantly since the 2003 White Paper.

Q449 Mr Prentice: Did David Miliband consult you about his reply to the Prime Minister when the Prime Minister appointed him and sent him a personal minute? Did David Miliband go through his response to the Prime Minister with you? Can you tell us that?

Ms Rutter: It was obviously a departmental effort. We had a lot of discussion within the Department about David's reply.

Q450 Chairman: That is a yes.

Ms Rutter: "Consult" is a strange word.

Q451 Mr Prentice: Okay. When he is talking to the Prime Minister there is an interesting section here on waste and David is telling Tony about the prospect of achieving consensus on the nuclear waste issue. Would you like to tell us more about this emerging consensus on nuclear waste?

Ms Rutter: I think you will have to wait and find some opportunity to talk to David Miliband himself about that, I am afraid.

Q452 Kelvin Hopkins: I came in to the meeting somewhat sceptical and I have actually become cynical from hearing what you said. It strikes me that we have this very forward-looking panoply of organisations with structures and the Government take almost no notice whatsoever. Indeed although Jonathan says you have been welcomed into the parlour to warm yourselves by the fire, they still take no notice when it comes to the crunch. You are now experiencing what Marcuse called repressive toleration, where you are asked for your view and then ignored.

Jonathan Porritt: I do not think you should be quite as cynical as that. Susan referred, for instance, to the Royal Commission's report on transport. The first integrated transport strategy that John Prescott was responsible for in 1998 was very heavily influenced by the thinking of the Royal Commission. You cannot say that Government were not listening at that point. The fact that they have burnt that document now and shredded it and are back to their, in my opinion, not very clever and unsustainable old ways on transport is a lack of political leadership and political will. It is not a failure in terms of being in receipt of good advice that it thought it might be able to action and make real. I am trying to pick up on this process issue about whether or not it is responding to the advice that it gets from sources such as us. I would bring you back to farming again and the Government have been very open to external advice in that area on the future of the countryside and on farming and food issues. On waste issues, and I am not talking about nuclear waste here, a lot of the advice brought to bear by external bodies is now being reflected more in the Government's thinking. Putting to one side the nuclear issue, which I agree has not being handled as well as it should have been in our opinion, on many other issues to do with renewables, the energy efficiency issue, a commitment to decentralised energy and microgeneration - again I find myself in a peculiar role here of defending the Government's ability to move things forward - there is a clear sense of taking that advice and embedding it in policy. I do not honestly think outright cynicism is a proper response. You, as parliamentarians, are right to point out that Government's speed of response to these issues is utterly deplorable; utterly deplorable. I find the degree to which these things are not being responded to properly with new policies coming forward beggars belief; absolutely beggars belief. However, that is a different issue, that is a timing issue rather than a complete "Get off our patch and let us get on with government" issue because that is not an accurate representation of what is happening.

Professor Owens: May I just support Jonathan broadly in that argument? If you look at legislation over the last few decades, there are very clear reflections of the recommendations of the Royal Commission and indeed other advisory bodies. It is there in the legislation in regulations and in changing ways of doing things. More importantly, it is there in different ways of thinking about the environment and environmental problems and different principles and philosophies of environmental policy which are perhaps more important in the longer term than the specific recommendations. I am not totally cynical. It is getting more difficult because in the early days the Royal Commission was dealing essentially with the gross pollution problems that were the externalities of production. Now it is dealing with the politics of consumption and that is much, much more difficult for governments and others to grasp.

Q453 Kelvin Hopkins: Just one more question. Alan Simpson, my colleague, last night drew attention to the fact that in so many areas including in energy we are behind what other countries are doing. They are intervening in the market and making things happen. We are leaving things to the market, a light touch regulation as Alan so delicately put it last night. Is that not the situation and are we not really fiddling while fossil fuel burns?

Jonathan Porritt: The real shorthand answer to that is that the Government put undue emphasis on market forces to bring about the integrated optimal solutions that we need and that it should be more proactive in the way in which it regulates those markets to achieve those outcomes. That is why the Commission is currently carrying out a detailed review of the work of Ofgem in this area to assess the degree to which it has been given the right remit to act as the right kind of regulatory body knowing what we now know about issues like energy security and climate change.

Professor Owens: I agree it is the case for an integrated strategy, but it also does have to confront some very deeply embedded aspects of lifestyles and that is difficult.

Chairman: We should like to go on longer because this is fascinating. We have only scratched the surface; I apologise for that. It all invites further discussion. We have benefited greatly from you being here. Jill, when you wake up in the morning and find the Daily Mail headline which says "Top civil servant says no brain at the centre" your career may be in ruins but you will have done us a service. Thank you very much indeed.

 

Examination of Witness

Witness: Professor Sir David King FRS, Chief Scientific Adviser to the Government and Head of the Office of Science and Innovation, gave evidence.

Q454 Chairman: Perhaps I could just say for the record and to get us going, first of all apologies to David King that we are late getting your session on; it was because the other one extended itself for good reasons, but I do apologise for that. We are delighted to have you, thank you very much for coming. You are ending our inquiry into looking at strategic thinking inside Government. We wondered whether you would like to say anything by way of introduction or whether we should just launch in and ask you some questions.

Professor Sir David King: I should be very happy to say a few words by way of introduction. What we are going to be discussing is largely the work of my Foresight team and the Horizon Scanning team and perhaps I could just tell you a little bit about how that has been redirected since I took post. The Foresight team had been working on something like 12 or 13 parallel tasks all of which were published on the same day when I took over. By acting this broadly, the impact of Foresight had been very broad. We did get a lot of people in the country into thinking into the future, business people and others, which was a very important part of the exercise. When I came into Government, I was fairly quickly faced with the foot-and-mouth-disease epidemic and it seemed appropriate to me after that to try to put myself in a position where I would be facing such a situation in the future in a proactive rather than a reactive fashion. In other words, I was totally unprepared for that and had to work in real time during an epidemic to develop the science base which had moved very substantially, and this is an important point, since 1967 when we last had a foot-and-mouth-disease epidemic. The lessons learned from that epidemic were no longer appropriate, but the response of a government department is to take them out and act accordingly. What I did was gather a science team, look at what we could do with modern science and then feed advice into Government and we brought that epidemic under control rather quickly with that process. Looking at the Foresight team, it seemed to me appropriate that we should review it and revise its strategic methodology. What has now emerged, and we have now matured the process so that it is in a good state, is a system in which we choose very carefully a Foresight project. It is quite well defined and it has to be chosen as an area where government ministers, Government generally, would have an interest in the outcome and where we would be looking at the horizon for potential risks and potential opportunities for the United Kingdom. The process is an in-depth process; I like to describe it as mining into the knowledge capability that exists in our country through the universities and research institutes for the benefit of policy advice into Government. Typically a programme will be chosen. I take as an example flood and coastal defence management because that was one of the first two. I will first of all do a bit of scoping in the Office, decide whether we can add value in this area by taking a view that does not look two to five years into the future but looks in the space 10 to 80 years into the future, a long time ahead. Having scoped that, I find a government minister who would be prepared to chair a stakeholder board to adopt the work as it emerges and I am using that word carefully because the stakeholder board does not interfere with the process of the work but takes an interest. It will meet only three times typically during the period of the work of the team and that is mainly reporting and getting feedback on the general direction. I then set up a team of around 100 scientists, technologists, engineers, economists, social scientists, an appropriate group of people from, let us call it, the knowledge base and we work with them. The time span is usually a year-and-a-half to two-and-a-half years. I would say that 90 per cent of our programmes fit into that timescale. We work with them over that period. In the first stage of the work we have now established a procedure. We are working with an inter-disciplinary team, communication tends to be a problem and we tend to use science writers to assist that process. Science writers will re-write material that is produced by scientists which is often not capable of direct consumption by people outside their field. We will review what the current state of knowledge is in the area and review it in depth. The reviews are published, everything is published that we do, it is all open and transparent and the reviews are published often in the form of a book. It might be up to a 1,000 to 1,500 pages long, but this is just the first part of the process. We then move into the second part, which is examining, from that knowledge base, how we can advise Government on modes of operation, thinking about modes of operation in that time span, 10 to 80 years hence, but coming back to what actions are required today so as to be in a better place when that time span has lapsed. If you take the flood and coastal defence management programme, the outcome is that the Government have roughly doubled the amount of funds we are now spending on flood and coastal defence management. What we did was look at what the climate change scientists could tell us about the impacts on Britain out to 2080 and then we came back to the present day, so that if we are going to manage the risk to the United Kingdom from the increased impacts from flooding and coastal defence attack, this is the kind of investment we need to begin to make now so as to optimise our position into the future. We have now covered a range of topics in the last five years and we have engaged a good number of ministers across Government, I think the total number is about 14, as ministers involved in the stakeholder process. The topics include brain science, addiction and drugs, detection and identification of infectious diseases, which, by the way, was easily our most ambitious project. It involved a community of 400 scholars working with us including 50 from Africa and 50 from China and, just to indicate the kind of new ground that we break, in that case we looked at plant, animal and human diseases together and the stakeholder board was then joined by the three international bodies, WHO, FAO and OIE, which deal with plant, animal and human infectious diseases. We were told that nobody had previously put those three subjects together and the outcome has attracted an enormous amount of attention around the world. I can tell you that one of the outcomes was that 80 per cent of human diseases originate from animals and the need for this kind of work emerged from our project to develop it. Intelligent infrastructure systems. This was really taking a look at the transport system in terms of integrated transport but looking at it not in isolation but in relation to, for example, urban planning and in relation to the impacts of climate change and how we might reduce that as we move forward in time. Cognitive systems. We were looking at the state of brain science and the state of IT technology, putting them together to see what could be learned from both communities. Cyber trust and crime prevention. The cyber trust issue is now raising its head as identity theft, for example, so the whole question of cyber trust was, I would suggest, very timely for us to look at. Then perhaps a slightly more difficult topic, exploiting the electro-magnetic spectrum, which is taking recent science from the physical sciences area and seeing where we could apply it. We have just started a project on tackling obesities, actually we are reasonably well into it, and last night I initiated a project on brain capital and well-being. This is looking at the functioning of the human brain, how it can perhaps be optimised in terms of education of young children. We now understand in very fine detail how the human brain develops. How can we use that in relation to educational improvements? At the other end of the spectrum, at the old age end of the spectrum, how do we manage the situation where brain capacity begins to diminish? How do we optimise the situation for our society, looking at the question of human capital but focusing down on optimising the function of the brain and the concept of wellbeing alongside that? So a good range of topics. If I may make one more point about these, in terms of the brain science, addiction and drugs, the outcome of that, which again was published, looks at all the advances over the next 20 years likely to come from the science base. These include revolutionising treatment for mental disorders, delivering new treatments for addiction, offering new recreational psycho-active substances with fewer harms. Here we are raising ethical issues where Government need to take note of these issues that are in the pipeline ahead of time. A new category of drug is emerging which would improve the cognitive performance of healthy people, so here is an interesting challenge as well. A particular drug, modafinil, for example, was developed by scientists working on narcolepsy, people who tend to fall asleep at odd moments. If you give these people the drug and you fine tune the amount of drug, they can sleep eight hours a night and do not fall asleep during the day. If you feed it to a healthy person, that person can work 24/7 for seven days on end without any loss of capacity, if anything with cognitive enhancement.

Q455 Chairman: Where do we get it from?

Professor Sir David King: You can see the issues that are raised. Would you allow children to be given modafinil if they are heading up to their GCSEs or their A levels et cetera? What we are often trying to do is flesh out issues in advance of them hitting the headlines, so that governments can prepare themselves for that.

Q456 Chairman: That is fascinating. May I just ask you a couple of things? One is that I am not clear why you do some of this work as opposed to other people doing it. It is all very impressive work, it has obviously been done to a very, very high standard. It strikes me that it could be done in other places. Some of it, as you were saying, could have been done by an international body because it is not limited to a particular context. Some of it could have been done by other bits of the strategic machinery inside Government that we have been stumbling across: strategy units in Number 10, the strategy bits of departments. Some, obesity, seem to sit absolutely inside a departmental silo. I am just not sure what triggers the involvement of Foresight and what extra it brings to the system.

Professor Sir David King: My role in Government is, as chief scientific adviser, to see that the best possible advice is placed before Government from across the scientific patch. In that role I attempt to see that every government department has the proper scientific capacity fit for purpose, provides the right advice into secretary of state and ministers and that that advice is given in a form where those ministers are likely to use it. That is what I need to report to the Prime Minister on and I have worked hard in that capacity. Secondly, my role is trans-departmental. I have a trans-departmental science and technology team which looks at the science and innovation strategies of each government department, but also looks at issues that run across government departments. Whereas you would look at obesity perhaps largely as a Department of Health issue, we would say that there is also, for example, an educational issue. There are other issues that come into obesity than just health, for example DCMS is interested in obesity. So we do tend to pick on issues which are trans-departmental but, more particularly, running the government Foresight programme, we are looking beyond the timescale that the government departments tend to be working on. The hectic life of an adviser within a government department is dealing with issues that are on the immediate horizon rather than the more distant one.

Q457 Chairman: Do you feel able to recommend policy conclusions from the work that you do? I ask that because one issue which has arisen in this inquiry is the relative advantages of having bodies doing this kind of work absolutely closely in Government, because you get buy-in to Government. However, that has a downside because you can take some bad flack around it. All bodies working outside Government can be more freelance and can say more radical things but do not have a purchase on Government. How do you experience that?

Professor Sir David King: The way Foresight was restructured five years ago, which I have just described, is to try to meet precisely those two disparate requirements and I do not think we have fallen between the stools in doing that. The team of people who work with us, and I should give credit to my Foresight team who have developed an expertise in oiling the process and they do it extremely well, work in-house to develop that ability to work with the Foresight programme, but we are working with people largely external to Government. That work is done without any interference so I always tell them to get on with it, make their report, publish it; it has our imprimatur but it is their property. Then the stakeholder board provides purchase into Government so this does not just float out into space, but the government minister who takes on the responsibility to chair it, and sometimes that minister's successor, is then responsible to carry through whatever advice has been given. I will go back a year later, and they know this, to find out what has been achieved in that period and then I will report to the Prime Minister on that, so there is an expectation of a follow-through. It is put in the public domain and I have to say what we have discovered is that working in that time space ten years hence turns out to be a rather safe space.

Q458 Chairman: Let me just ask you one final question from me which is that we had an interesting exchange with the previous witnesses, particularly Jonathan Porritt, who said that 20 or 30 years ago, when he was leading up the environmental movement, he was really working on instinct and it was not really empirically well grounded. It turned out to be right, he hastened to add, but not good science. He said it is quite different now. He said now the science is irrefutable, certainly on the environmental side, and that changes completely what you would expect from Government. Is that analysis broadly right do you think?

Professor Sir David King: It is broadly right. The Foresight process is helping to bring an awareness of that forward. My own position, if I may, is that the 20^th century has seen science, technology and medicine provide all of the wealth-creating and health-creating opportunities that we felt we needed, but without any attention being paid really to the state of our environment, to the state of our resources. The 21^st century challenge for science and technology is to spell out in advance what the risks are ahead of us and then come back and see that we develop the science and technology that can manage that. I say that because the population is 6.4 billion as we sit here today. In 2028 it will pass eight billion and in 2050 it will reach around nine billion. The 2028 figure is fairly certain. What that is doing, another 50 per cent to our population over a 50 year period, is placing an enormous burden on our resources particularly as we all recognise that many of the under-developed countries are developing rapidly and all want a much higher standard of living. We are faced with a planet in a different state in relation to humanity this century and it is now very much a focus of many scientists around the world to see how we can optimise that situation.

Q459 Mr Burrowes: As you go through your programme, particularly looking at the brain science, addiction and drugs part of the programme, is your remit for looking at that area, as for all the other areas, completely free of departmental influence?

Professor Sir David King: I set the programme within my Office and we do scoping; we tend to settle on a topic and then scope it and it changes. Then, having done that, the Minister does not say to me "Sorry that's not quite right, can you try something rather different?". At this stage we proceed independently.

Q460 Mr Burrowes: Yes, but when you set the remits, say in addiction and drugs, are you aware of fitting in with various policy presumptions?

Professor Sir David King: Interesting; "policy presumptions".

Q461 Mr Burrowes: May I help? Addiction: the Government do not have a strategy on addiction, for example. It does have a strategy on drugs supposedly; we could argue. They do have a strategy. Whether it has had any effect is another issue. In terms of their strategies, they do not have an addiction strategy. In your decision to have a remit of addiction, was that one where you were seeking to challenge a presumption? How did that come to pass?

Professor Sir David King: Your question does not meet how I would set about the task. I would rather set about it in the following way. Brain science - and British scientists have been leading the way - has transformed our understanding of how the brain functions. I was mentioning how we are now looking at a programme to improve the education of young children to optimise the moment of brain development when you educate people, if we can. In terms of brain science one of the key areas which have been developed is the complete molecular understanding of how drugs work in the brain and whether the brain is damaged on a permanent basis and so on by different drugs. All this level of understanding has emerged just in the last five or six years. We have this tremendous capacity there and it becomes quite apparent that that knowledge should therefore feed into every government system - and I have to insist that it does, no matter which government is there - to aid it in developing policies towards addiction and drugs. We are looking at science and looking at areas where we can provide evidence-based policy advice into the government system.

Q462 Mr Burrowes: May I tease this out a little further? You then move on to provide scenarios for the development of drugs for treating addiction. The issue of treating has various different definitions and can include presumptions. It could be achievement that seeks to harm reduce the impact of drugs or seeks to lead to an absence from drugs for example. Are any assumptions made as to where you see the issue of treatment?

Professor Sir David King: Specifically not. Now I think we have come to the point; you have clarified it for me. No. We will allow this group of scientists and social scientists and medics and so on to reach and draw out their own conclusions. The ownership of the report is amongst those 100 top scientists and others who have been aiding us.

Q463 Mr Burrowes: Yes, but in the area of treatment and addiction you have people in different camps. It is obviously a matter for you. One could not stay neutral as a social scientist. Ultimately, whilst it is evidence-based, people do come from different viewpoints, different perspectives and different presumptions. I am trying to tease out how you are able to get to an objective, evidenced conclusion.

Professor Sir David King: The process by which science arrives at conclusions is through challenge. The business is always one of people appearing to be disagreeing with each other. Out of that emerges a state of knowledge which is then partly, if not wholly, accepted and then we move onto the next area which is the cutting edge of science and there is more challenge. All of that is taken into account in the process. We present, as clearly as we can, the current state of knowledge and if there are disagreements, they will be presented as well.

Q464 Mr Burrowes: Is all that process independent of any policy or departmental influence?

Professor Sir David King: Absolutely.

Q465 Mr Burrowes: What about your awareness of the parliamentary challenge? For example the Science and Technology Committee have challenged the whole issue of evidence in terms of the Government's approach to addictions, specifically focusing on drugs and have challenged the paucity of evidence for their programme. How do you fit in with that kind of challenge from Parliament?

Professor Sir David King: My role would be to advise the Cabinet and the Cabinet includes the Home Secretary and that becomes an issue separate from the Foresight process. It is not always separable, because obviously we are trying to put forward a Foresight process which provides a strong evidence base. Nevertheless there is another part of my role which is to see that the best evidence-based advice goes in to Government. In that process I have been seeing that all government departments where science can assist that evidence base have appointed chief scientific advisers themselves. Within the Home Office Professor Paul Wiles is the Chief Scientific Adviser and he is the person who is responsible within that department for seeing that the best advice goes to the Secretary of State.

Q466 Mr Burrowes: In terms of the question of parliamentary challenge, there are other bodies such as Parliament looking at the issue of evidence and an evidence-based approach and the merits and strengths of it. The Science and Technology Committee have done a report on the issue of addictions and I am just asking how much notice you take of that and how much it forms part of the challenge in your determination.

Professor Sir David King: I have always taken a lot of notice of the House of Commons and the House of Lords and in particular I do meet up frequently with the Science and Technology Select Committee. I think they are a body with an enormous amount to contribute.

Chairman: That was the right answer.

Q467 Mr Burrowes: The other body is the Strategy Unit. On the issue of drugs they came up with blue-sky thinking on a drugs strategy, they had a PowerPoint presentation on which we have commented here in the past. Do you have any link with them?

Professor Sir David King: The Strategy Unit in Number 10 is a unit with which we keep in touch in the sense that they know what our programme of work is and we know what their programme of work is.

Q468 Mr Burrowes: There is knowledge but is there any link to the point of influence?

Professor Sir David King: I am sure the Strategy Unit is influenced by our work in the Foresight programme. Just in response to your previous questions, what I am keen to tell you is that we do not take interference into the Foresight programme. I will tell the Strategy Unit what we are choosing as topics, but I am not inviting the Strategy Unit in.

Q469 Chairman: I think what David was wondering on the area he gave, the drugs area, was that you had the Strategy Unit, but you also had John Birt who wandered in and decided that he wanted to do work in this area. You, as Chief Scientific Adviser, what is your reaction to this?

Professor Sir David King: My voice in Government is determined by the strength of the evidence base that I provide. I certainly would not complain about access to the Prime Minister and the Cabinet.

Q470 Chairman: Is it not confusing having lots of people trampling over the same area? You are bringing the highest scientific intelligence to bear on it; you are the official top man.

Professor Sir David King: I think I have given you my reply. It is very kind of you to say that.

Q471 Mr Burrowes: You produce these scenarios and then departments take them forward. Given the high quality, high level evidence-based approach which you take, does any challenge come in at a later stage or do you just hand it over to them and it is up to them to come up with their thinking?

Professor Sir David King: Does any challenge come in?

Q472 Mr Burrowes: Come in later. In terms of the process, would you come back to them and say that this is the policy approach they are taking and this is the evidence-based approach you have come to and there is a conflict?

Professor Sir David King: Will I challenge the ministerial system?

Q473 Mr Burrowes: In terms of communication, is there ongoing communication?

Professor Sir David King: If I understand you correctly, I hope I have developed two aspects to my reputation since coming into Government: one is for openness, honesty, transparency. I have been very keen to put everything in the public domain in terms of advice I have put in to Government, unless the Intelligence Services are involved. The second is that I do not tend to let things go. I will go in and raise issues if it seems to me that the evidence-based advice is not being followed.

Q474 Mr Burrowes: If we had another John Birt who came in with some blue-sky thinking on addictions, plainly that would be a scenario where you would want in an open way to challenge the view on the basis of your scientific approach. Just a hypothetical scenario.

Professor Sir David King: Your Chairman has very kindly said that ours is clearly very strongly evidence-based and that is the weight we have. It is based on the strength of the evidence we produce.

Q475 Mr Burrowes: Would you challenge that situation if it arose?

Professor Sir David King: With the evidence I would challenge any situation.

Q476 Mr Prentice: We know that if everyone in the world had the same standard of living as we do in the UK we would need the resources of three planets. You frightened me when you were talking about all these billions of new people who are going to be with us shortly. Are we all doomed?

Professor Sir David King: I am not simply going to dismiss your question: it is the 21^st century question. I do not believe that human civilisation has previously been faced with an issue as complex as this because it requires collective action. Here I am referring to the fact that we might take all the right steps in this country to deal with these issues, but if other countries do not, then the situation is going to be rather difficult to manage into the future. Collective action is what is demanded of us through this century and that is going to require a tremendous amount of hard work.

Q477 Mr Prentice: That is interesting. Should we have a nuclear energy programme because the French across the Channel have one? I am just extending the point you have just made that if we were to have a policy which is non-nuclear it would be pointless because all these other countries round the globe are developing nuclear industries of their own.

Professor Sir David King: Are you referring to nuclear energy on the grid?

Q478 Mr Prentice: Yes, nuclear energy.

Professor Sir David King: I think you are managing to ask me a big question about energy supply within that. My view is well known. We used to have 30 per cent of our grid energy from nuclear power, essentially carbon dioxide free. As we move forward in time, by 2020 we shall be down to five per cent; we are currently at 19 per cent. The amount of nuclear on the grid is diminishing. At the same time we are trying to reduce CO₂ emissions. Whatever we do in terms of renewable energy tends to be cancelled out by the loss of yet another nuclear power station. My argument is that nuclear power stations need to be replaced so that we can manage that process of reducing our emissions into the future. That is an argument within the British circumstance. I believe other countries also need to adopt our policy of reducing emissions by 60 per cent by 2050.

Q479 Mr Prentice: Was that advice that you gave to the Prime Minister, because the Government are changing their view on this? The Energy White Paper in 2003 is very different from the Prime Minister's latest pronouncements that see us without a nuclear energy future.

Professor Sir David King: The 2003 White Paper has a statement in it which is effectively leaving the door open for a possible return to nuclear energy.

Q480 Mr Prentice: That has been closed now, has it not?

Professor Sir David King: It has now been more firmly opened.

Q481 Mr Prentice: Opened; yes.

Professor Sir David King: So we are returning to review the energy situation only three years after the White Paper 2003 and we are going to have a White Paper 2007 published in March next year. I think this was a necessary process to establish what, for example, is the public response to the development of wind farms around the UK. If I may put in some figures, we now have 1.4 gigawatts wind power potential up and running and we have another 9.5 gigawatts of wind power potential caught up in planning. There is an issue there which we need to look at again. We have learned about this issue over the last three years. As well, the issue around nuclear energy has focused itself very sharply around the fact that many of the utilities are now looking at nuclear energy in terms of its cost effectiveness.

Q482 Mr Prentice: Yes, we are interested in your views because you advise the Prime Minister and he is the man who for the moment calls the shots. Did you know that the present generation of nuclear power stations is literally falling to bits? Did you know that back in 2003?

Professor Sir David King: The nuclear power stations in the United Kingdom are subjected to - and I say this with some certainty - the most stringent health and safety process probably of any nuclear power stations in the world.

Q483 Mr Prentice: You would have seen the reports in the press today that power stations are going to be closed down while repairs take place and so on and so forth.

Professor Sir David King: Of course I have. Yes, I have seen those reports and prior to those reports I was aware of the cracks which have been reported. I am also aware of the HSE reports on those power stations. What I conclude from all of that is that we have a good system. In other words, if HSE instructs a system to be shut down it will be shut down under safe conditions. I do not agree with your description that they are falling apart, but I do think that there is a real issue here which is that we need modern power stations. Essentially what we are looking at in those power stations are the equivalent of Model T Fords compared with the technology which is now available. It is very important that we acknowledge that there is new technology available now which would be considerably safer, waste product considerably less than the old Model T Ford power stations.

Q484 Mr Prentice: It is reassuring. The Financial Times tells us that only one of British Energy's nuclear power stations is working normally, but you are telling us that because the Health and Safety people have discovered a few cracks then the system is fine.

Professor Sir David King: I would object very strongly to my words being picked up and turned around in the way you just did. I think that is grossly unfair.

Q485 Mr Prentice: I apologise.

Professor Sir David King: I am the Chief Scientific Adviser. You may play these games as politicians.

Q486 Mr Prentice: I apologise if I caused offence; that was not my intention. However, nuclear energy is a red hot issue of the moment and it generates a lot of debate.

Professor Sir David King: And very little carbon dioxide.

Q487 Mr Prentice: I am interested in your views because of your advice to the Prime Minister. May I finish on a separate point? Foot and mouth. For the life of me I cannot remember when the outbreak was.

Professor Sir David King: We first knew about it on 20 February 2001.

Q488 Mr Prentice: When foot and mouth was raging you were already the Government's Chief Scientific Adviser. Is that right?

Professor Sir David King: I had just come into post.

Q489 Chairman: That is why you remember the date, is it not?

Professor Sir David King: It is.

Q490 Mr Prentice: I suppose the question for me is: what was your advice at the time to the Government? Was it vaccinate or not? I remember the National Farmers' Union being dead against vaccination because if we vaccinated the animals we would lose valuable export markets. What was your advice to the Government on that?

Professor Sir David King: I became involved in the foot-and-mouth-disease epidemic on roughly 18 March, so the epidemic had been running for a while. In my new post I felt that I ought to provide the best possible advice. What I did - and I mentioned this earlier on - was draw together a group of scientists, vets, farmers, practical people as well as epidemiological modellers and in addition modellers from the MoD so that any advice I gave would be within the capacity of the MoD to operate. Having built that team together, we modelled the epidemic on the basis of the data which was being published by the Ministry for Agriculture, Food and Fisheries, as it was then, and we produced output from the models, running them on fairly large-scale computers, in a relatively short space of time. From that we understood that with the control procedures, that is the lessons learned from the outbreak in 1967 with the control procedures put in place, the epidemic was out of control. The day that I concluded that and told the Prime Minister I also went on the media to state that, just to underline my previous point about being open and transparent about the advice that I give. The upshot was that the understanding that it was out of control - this means that the epidemic was increasing exponentially with time - meant that we had to find a new control procedure to install, so we tried to map onto our computer models a whole variety of control procedures. This included vaccination and it included different cull procedures. I went back to the Prime Minister once we had turned the exponential growth into exponential decay with one of these models and that model was effectively put into place. I have to emphasise that it was put into place alongside control procedures which had already been introduced by MAFF. For example, the three-mile-radius cull which had already begun in the Lake District area was continued alongside the new programme of culling which came out of my modelling. The upshot was that, as I predicted, within two days exponential growth turned into exponential decay and as a matter of fact the predictive theory which was published in all the media in advance of time was followed very precisely by the data points as they kept coming in. The point I am going to make is that we included vaccination and rejected it for the very simple reason that the vaccination model was to create a ring around a newly infected farm and then vaccinate inwards and cull the infected farm in the middle. In our modelling we found that we would have to vaccinate over a very large region in order to have the same control process that we did with the refined culling procedure. What was also clear to me at the time - and this is terribly important - was that the methodology for distinguishing whether or not an animal was diseased could not distinguish a diseased animal from a vaccinated animal. What this meant was that once you started vaccination with any haphazard movement of animals you could lose control of what had been vaccinated and what had not and serology was the only test which was available then, there was no PCR test available to us. It also meant that if we were to emerge with our foot-and-mouth-disease-free status as a nation we would therefore have to cull not only the sick animals but every animal that was vaccinated if we wanted to return to the international FMD-free status. The Dutch Government on the other hand, where there was also an outbreak, followed the other model we had tried, the vaccination model. The upshot was that the Dutch Government culled approximately ten times more animals than we did per infected farm in order to bring themselves back into an FMD-free international status. I am delighted to have this opportunity to explain this because there are several people in the media who have still not understood that story.

Mr Prentice: You were very clear.

Q491 Julie Morgan: I believe the 2001 general election was put off for a month because of the foot-and-mouth situation, was it not? Were you part of those discussions?

Professor Sir David King: Let me answer you in this way. I was fully aware of the fact that 5 May had been pencilled in by many people in the media at least as a date for the general election. The general election was actually called on 7 June that year. Whether this was something to do with the modelling predictions I made or not you would need to ask the Prime Minister.

Q492 Julie Morgan: But you made the modelling predictions to him and he decided on 7 June.

Professor Sir David King: The Prime Minister was certainly aware of the modelling predictions and, according to the predictions, by 5 May we would still not have had it under control but by 7 June it would be very much a minor outbreak.

Chairman: It just shows how useful it is to have a Chief Scientific Adviser, does it not?

Q493 Julie Morgan: A few more general questions. How do you decide which subjects to look at in depth?

Professor Sir David King: The first two programmes I initiated were decided in my Office. I felt that flood and coastal defence management, in the light of what I understood about the impacts of climate change on Britain, would be an important project, so I chose that one. Another one we chose was on cognitive systems which relates back to our understanding of brain science and my sense that we could inform information technology developments to see whether we could mirror how the brain works in information technology. Subsequently we set up what has now come to be known as the hothouse of about 15 smart people who get together in a hotel. We lock them into the hotel for 24 hours with a group of enablers and they are given the instruction to come up with a dozen Foresight programmes. They discuss over that 24-hour period. Usually they come up with a number, around 60 or 70, and then that boils down to the optimal 10 or 12. We have gone through two thirds of those from that first process but subsequently other issues have emerged and now we have had a second hothouse process and we are beginning to work on the projects emerging from that.

Q494 Julie Morgan: That sounds absolutely fascinating: a hothouse for 24 hours with a group of people. Who are the people who are put in?

Professor Sir David King: They are leading scientists from different areas; leading medics, veterinary scientists, economists, sociologists, editors of major journals, editors of Nature for example, people who have a broad picture as well as narrow specialists. Perhaps at this point I could just mention to you that the Chancellor asked me to develop a centre of excellence for horizon scanning. The centre of excellence for horizon scanning has developed a different methodology. If I may, perhaps I could just tell you something about that?

Q495 Chairman: Please do.

Professor Sir David King: The methodology has two sides to it. On the one hand we went to a group of 200 leading scientists around the world and asked them what developments in science today are likely to emerge as technological developments over the next 10 or 20 years. We developed this big base of push-outs from the science base, potential technologies, some of them pretty wild. On the other side we went to political scientists, social scientists, philosophers, economists and asked what the big challenges were going to be in the world of tomorrow. Let me give you an example. Today we have a globalised economy. What is the possibility that we will move back towards the insular economies of the past because of various challenges. We asked them for the big challenges we are faced with over the next 50 to 100 years. We have the pull-through from the way we anticipate societies will develop and the push-out from what science and technology can deliver. Then we are filling the space in between. We are looking at areas where the science and technology could meet future problems, which is really why I said earlier on that the big challenge for science and technology is sustainability through the 21^st century, challenged by the fact that we do not have three planets. A lengthy answer to your question, but that gives you some idea. We have started another process and that process in the centre there will also be used to mine out new topics for Foresight.

Q496 Julie Morgan: So the Prime Minister would not ask you to look at a topic.

Professor Sir David King: There is no reason why the Prime Minister should not ask me to look at a topic, but none of the topics we have looked at has been selected by the Prime Minister. On the other hand - and in a way this comes back to David Burrowes's earlier question - the brain science, drugs and addiction programme actually emerged from a different path, which was the chief scientists in both the Department of Health and the Home Office suggesting that as a potential project. This was really looking at the longer term from their own perspective, at what was a potential area where we could assist the process.

Q497 Julie Morgan: If your advice is not followed in the departments, did you say you then report that to the Prime Minister?

Professor Sir David King: I am glad you have given me the opportunity to clarify. When we have finished the project - we have a language which tries to clarify this - we then launch the project into the hands of the stakeholder minister. The stakeholder minister's responsibility is to take it forward. I go back a year later and report back to the Prime Minister on what has been achieved over that period.

Q498 Kelvin Hopkins: You have already demonstrated, to me at least, that science and politics overlap and that you cannot just be a scientist in your position. You are a politician in a sense because you make choices. On nuclear power, in a sense you have made a choice. Would you accept that there are other choices which may be more expensive, but there are other choices which politicians might make?

Professor Sir David King: My role is to provide the best possible advice, so my answer to the question about nuclear power was simply to point out the challenging situation we have because of our ageing nuclear power fleet, which is why I say I was aware of the cracks in the fleet. It is a political decision to decide how to deal with that situation. There may be more expensive routes ahead. My objective is to take science out of the box. I do not want it left in a box where people can say it has nothing to do with politics so I respond very positively to your question. This is science within the political system; I am an adviser within the political system, but I am an adviser, I do not take decisions.

Q499 Kelvin Hopkins: Given that you are dealing with politicians, almost all of them are not scientists, one or two of them are, I should have thought they would tend to defer to your recommendation quite strongly in such a matter and you have a very privileged position in that respect.

Professor Sir David King: I should have to say that I think I understand that and I should also have to tell you that I am extremely circumspect in the advice that I give, particularly if the consequences are very substantial. For example, we are all aware of the fact that an avian flu epidemic is on its way round the world, there are many countries where it has been quite severe in the poultry population and there is a potential for a human flu pandemic to develop if the virus transforms. I have to advise the Government with the best possible scientific advice on what is the right way to prepare for such an eventuality and that is done with enormous care.

Q500 Kelvin Hopkins: I am sure there are occasions when your scientific advice might make life very uncomfortable for politicians and in a sense they do not want to go there. I give one example: foetal alcohol spectrum disorder. There is a small, very strong body of evidence of children having this, but there is substantial evidence of a lot more suffering from it. I have raised this in the Commons and the Government do not seem to want to take it on board because clearly it would mean a difficult decision recommending to all women that they do not drink when they are pregnant. I will say that the evidence comes in from your original country, South Africa, where black women working on wine estates were paid largely in wine, or to some extent in wine, and an enormous number of babies have been damaged by foetal alcohol syndrome there. Do you sometimes come across these uncomfortable things where Government are resistant to taking just the information let alone advice because they know it leads in a direction they do not want to go?

Professor Sir David King: I am only hesitating because I have not actually experienced that. I am trying to think through. I have not experienced that difficulty, but this is not to say the advice is always taken. No, I cannot give you an example.

The Committee suspended from 4.50pm to 4.58pm for a division in the House.

Q501 Paul Flynn: Which of the projects you have put up to the Government for consideration have been rejected?

Professor Sir David King: Is this for the Foresight programme?

Q502 Paul Flynn: For the Foresight programme, yes.

Professor Sir David King: None of them has been rejected.

Q503 Paul Flynn: The reason I ask the question is that when we spoke to Lord Birt on the Strategy Unit and the subject that he did on drugs, which David Burrowes gently described as a Government strategy, the report he did was one of high quality but one which was meant to be kept secret, that is the reason it probably was of high quality, because the main conclusion of it was one which was deeply embarrassing to the Government and all governments' programmes on drugs which have not been characterised by any empirical evidence. You have not come across that at all. Would you say that the subjects you pick are not avoided if they are potentially embarrassing to Government?

Professor Sir David King: My position on that is first of all that I am effectively an independent voice in Government. No, I would defend the publication and have done if anyone has ever suggested that we should not publish. These suggestions do come forward because sometimes it looks as though the material we are publishing - we always do the scenario analyses that David referred to - the scenarios look rather terrifying and there is concern that when you publish them, put them into the public domain this may seem to be government policy in some way. The media has never responded in that way. I think the media has taken our Foresight programme seriously as a contribution to the debate. However, the Strategy Unit is working on a much shorter timescale. I mentioned the safe space of ten years' onwards and that is quite an important point. The Strategy Unit is expecting results in the time period of a given minister or prime minister.

Q504 Paul Flynn: If I may illustrate the point, the main conclusion of this report which was only published under freedom of information, was that you could not control the drugs trade on the supply side, but that is precisely what the Government are doing in sending young men to die in Afghanistan. That is why it was potentially embarrassing. What other pressures are on you? When you reached your conclusions about nuclear power, what was the comparable weight of evidence, the quality of the scientists involved, from the nuclear power industry which is up and very prosperous, compared to the tidal power business which has enormous potential, again virtually no carbon except in the construction. How would you compare the two or the renewables and their voices? How loud, how persuasive were they and what quality compared to the ones we know to be very powerful from the nuclear industry?

Professor Sir David King: The answer to your question is that I think it is my function to see that I challenge all those communities so I do think my response is even-handed. If you look at my response in terms of whether it is a barrage on the Severn or wind farms or wave, I have been around the world finding out where best practice is in each of those areas and informed myself in that way. I do not rely on what experts tell me. My function is to challenge each and every one of those experts and then draw my conclusions. I was asked about nuclear. Now that you have raised the question of renewables and I believe that it is very important that we raise the level of renewables putting energy onto the grid in this country. I believe that it is equally important that we develop much better processes for dealing with energy efficiency as we move forward in time. That is the massive win-win: to improve energy efficiency. I think it is quite possible that over a 30-year period we could reduce energy usage in the built environment, which produces 50 per cent of our carbon dioxide by a factor of three by proper building regulations and by properly refurbishing old buildings. All of these things, every one of them, needs to be tacked down if we are going to manage what I think is a massive problem, the problem of global warming.

Q505 Paul Flynn: We accept entirely your scientific integrity but we are all subject to pressures on various sides. If we take the report you did on brain science, there is a controversy about brain chemistry between the group of people who claim that there is such a disease as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder which can be cured by a balance of the chemicals in the brain by using Ritalin and others who claim this is entirely theoretical, no-one has taken synovial fluid and measured it and found there was anything out of balance at all. If you came across something like that in your brain science report which would be very controversial and upset the pharmaceutical industry, or many other things on disease-mongering and so on which might upset the pharmaceutical industry, how do you feel under pressure by them, again another powerful lobby, who are contributing to your work? Would you come up with a conclusion like that and have no hesitation in presenting it even if it were damaging and embarrassing to powerful interests?

Professor Sir David King: I come back to the actual Foresight process. The ownership is taken by those 100 or so individuals who contribute to the process. In other words I may publish a foreword congratulating the people on the massive amount of work they have done - and really we do take up an enormous amount of the time and effort of the scientific community - but I do not step in and change their report one little bit. It is their ownership.

Q506 Paul Flynn: A final question which is based on what we are looking at here. You are very much in contact, you have given evidence to the scientific committees and to the Environmental Audit Committee on various occasions, but many of the other bodies involved in looking to the future have very little direct contact with parliamentarians as such. There is a suggestion to set up a committee to look at the future and to look at all policies, possibly build on the basis of how they will affect people in 25, 50, 100 years' time. Do you think this would be useful?

Professor Sir David King: Very simply: yes. I can hardly think of anything new that would be more useful than that.

Q507 Paul Rowen: You mentioned earlier on the work that goes on in departments and your work is necessarily very strategic. What monitoring do you do once you have published a report and it has been accepted by Government to ensure that the actual policies and procedures laid down in that report are being implemented?

Professor Sir David King: If I may answer your question broadly and then narrow it down, when I came into Government, faced with that foot-and-mouth-disease epidemic which I have now spoken on at some length, the Prime Minister asked me how we could ensure that every government department has improved access to science-based advice and asked me to report to him what was necessary. My report essentially said that we need a chief scientific adviser in each government department who has a dotted line to me and a direct line to their secretary of state so there is no filtering of that advice. Secondly, I said that I should develop a science review system to go into government department after government department to review the quality of the knowledge base, the evidence base that they are using, particularly around the sciences and to see the fitness for purpose of the work they are doing and to see whether that advice is taken. We have set up such a review process. It is an in-depth process and the reviews take time. It is a nine-month or so exercise on average and we have been a little slow in getting this underway. Nevertheless, it is under way and we are about to publish three reviews of different government departments. I think that the different government departments themselves are finding this very useful. There is always a sense of fear when they are coming in that we may be about to publish a critical report, but our analysis is always meant to be constructive and moving best practice from one government department to another, but also looking for areas where different government departments could assist each other, where they are unaware at the moment perhaps that they could do that. I set up a general process of review: the Foresight process is just a small part of that.

Q508 Paul Rowen: I do not know much about the three departments, but if I take one about which I know something, the Department for Transport, figures I have say that only 50 per cent of all new road building schemes have actually had a climate change assessment carried out on them. If you become aware of that and you have helped set the general policies with regard to climate change, what steps do you take to make sure that the department rectifies that?

Professor Sir David King: I would certainly be talking to the chief scientific adviser in the first instance and I would probably also be talking to the Secretary of State.

Q509 Paul Rowen: So I can expect some action on that?

Professor Sir David King: I did discuss matters with Douglas Alexander yesterday. There is good communication.

Q510 Paul Rowen: What about the Gershon reviews? How do you ensure that when those sorts of thing are going wrong the central tenets of the thrust you are trying to move the Government on is not lost in these efficiency savings?

Professor Sir David King: That is certainly a very good question. If we look at efficiency savings, it is also a matter of reducing staffing. Of course that is a problem. If we take the Foresight programme, we are not going to reduce the staff in the Foresight programme, but whether we would be able to expand it to begin to meet the demand which is now being developed around government departments for our Foresight activities has become the real question in the light of what you are saying.

Q511 Paul Rowen: There is only one Cabinet Minister who has a science background and many scientists feel that politicians in general and in Government in particular have nothing to offer for them. What do you do to try to ensure and foster a relationship which is fruitful so that Government understands what the needs of science are and that we are properly supporting science in this country?

Professor Sir David King: I think the answer to your question is that the most important thing is getting the evidence in front of ministers and not just to say this is the conclusion of the science but to explain it in plain language and in detail. My experience is that very generally ministers are very, very happy to have soundly-based advice.

Q512 Paul Rowen: Suppose you are saying something with which they do not agree? Is that a problem?

Professor Sir David King: If I go in armed with the facts and the detailed analysis ---

Paul Rowen: Do the facts not sometimes get in the way?

Q513 Mr Prentice: May I ask this question because we do not often have eminent scientists in front of us? I remember getting very agitated about the hole in the ozone layer and I speak very passionately about this. Recently I have learned that it is closing. Was that a surprise to you that the hole in the ozone layer was closing?

Professor Sir David King: As it happens, the chemistry department of which I used to be head in Cambridge was the department which was doing the modelling of the development of the ozone depletion layer, the so-called hole. It was very much advice emerging from that modelling which led to the Montreal decision to reduce CFCs. What the modelling did indicate was that it would take a considerable period of time for the repair to begin and it is only just beginning now and it will take another estimated roughly 70 years to fully repair. We do know that by banning CFCs - and, by the way, the ratcheting up after the Montreal process was remarkable; the political system did react responsibly and CFCs were virtually terminated within a few years - we have managed that problem for the planet, but we now have a far bigger problem ahead of us.

Q514 Chairman: So you were not surprised because you knew all about it. Just to end. Someone like you comes into Government and you come in from a scientific background and government is a funny old business and it talks about strategy and it talks about evidence-based policy-making and yet you discover pretty soon that it is not quite like that: policy gets determined for all kinds of reasons. You find machinery which is probably not very coherent in terms of getting hold of some of the big strategic issues and bringing scientific intelligence to bear on them. Does that make you feel frustrated with how Government does this? Does it make you think that Government could and should do it better?

Professor Sir David King: Yes and the whole purpose of my coming into Government has been to see that the Government response to the evidence base is improved. That is what I have seen as my challenge. I would have to say that over the past six years I think that there has been quite a turnaround amongst government ministers, for example seeking our advice on a whole range of issues now, whereas when I came into Government I do not think that really existed. It must be apparent that if you have the best possible advice to start from you are going to make better decisions and that is what we have managed to get through to Government. I am not suggesting that the tanker has been turned around 180^o. It is a long process and it is both government ministers and the way they are used to operating, but also the Civil Service. There is a large operation in place which has a long history and science has not always been to the fore in that process.

Chairman: It would be tantalising to go further down that route, but we have kept you longer than we promised and we are sorry about that and for the interruptions and for getting you on late. However, it has been a fascinating session and we are very grateful to you for coming along. Thank you very much indeed.