Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20-39)
PROFESSOR SIR
DAVID KING
AND MS
SUE DUNCAN
15 FEBRUARY 2006
Q20 Dr Iddon: I think your answer
reflects a worry that I have and the question, therefore, is:
by being embedded in the Treasury, you obviously spend a lot of
your time, as you have just described, on Treasury-related matters.
Ms Duncan: Yes.
Q21 Dr Iddon: Does that not detract
from the amount of time you should be spending on the other major
state departments?
Ms Duncan: I agree that that is
a risk in my move to the Treasury, but it is pretty clear that
that is not the intention and still my primary function is to
be the head of the Government Social Research service and to ensure
standards and quality both of its staff and the work that it does,
but that is certainly something that I will have to be discussing
with my new line manager when the move actually takes place.
Q22 Chairman: In terms of your role
as independent Chief Scientific Adviser principally to the Prime
Minister and the Government, is there not a contradiction between
that role and then managing what is basically a very significant
department? Would it not be better not to have that responsibility
and just purely to have the responsibility of being an independent
adviser to the Prime Minister and the Government?
Professor Sir David King: In my
role as independent adviser, it is absolutely critical that I
have the support that I have and, as a matter of fact, I think
the support is pretty minimal. We are a lean, mean machine in
the Office of Science and Technology. I, for example, could list
for you the various committees that I operate with and through,
a number of which I chair. If you take one of them, for example,
the Global Science and Innovation Forum, this forum is the only
forum that brings together the Foreign Office, UK Trade and Industry,
DTI, Defra, the Royal Society, the research councils and the British
Council to co-ordinate our approach to foreign policy, covering
the whole area of science and technology. That in itself is a
pretty good, challenging job and, engaging in that process, I
make many trips abroad in dealing with all of our bilateral arrangements
with other countries, and all of our negotiations with Brussels,
for example, on the Framework Programme take place through my
office, so that is just on the international scene. We have the
equivalent in the trans-departmental science and technology section,
dealing with science in government. The review process I have
described is a big process. Each review takes about six months.
When you go into a government department, so there is a lot of
work to be done. I think it would be wrong to think that my advice
is given from, if you like, the top of my head as a scientist.
For example, if there is an issue, such as avian flu, I will make
sure that the leading scientists give me a full briefing on avian
flu so that I am fully informed when I go in to give my advice.
Now, the process of drawing those people together requires an
office to provide the back-up.
Q23 Dr Turner: What is your relationship
with the chief scientific advisers of government departments,
at least those government departments that do have chief scientific
advisers, and that is another question I want to go back to? Do
you see yourself as their boss, their advocate or some kind of
counsellor? What is the relationship?
Professor Sir David King: The
chief scientific advisers in government departments, we now total
nine, including myself, and these chief scientific advisers I
am distinguishing, and I think this is in your question, as those
people who have been parachuted in as expert scientists from the
university community or from industry. These people are responsible
to their secretary of state for the evidence-based policy advice
system in their department. My line of responsibility to the Prime
Minister means that, in order to cover the patch across government,
I also need the chief scientific advisers to report to me, but
that is very much a dotted line; their direct line is to the secretary
of state in their department. I think the relationship is not
only a good one, it is an absolutely critically important relationship
because, taking all the chief scientific advisers together, we
do cross the patch. I mentioned Paul Wiles, who is a social scientist,
and Frank Kelly is a mathematician and Howard Doulton is a biological
scientist, so we cover the expertise across the wide sciences.
Having that capability for Paul Wyles, for example, in the Home
Office to call on that other expertise amongst the chief scientific
advisers, I think, is important to all of us.
Q24 Dr Turner: But there have been
occasions, and you have already mentioned foot and mouth which
clearly was an occasion, and we can talk about it because MAFF
does not exist anymore, where I suspect, looking at it from the
outside, that you felt that you had a need in your role as Chief
Scientific Adviser to intervene. Was that the case?
Professor Sir David King: Absolutely.
In that situation, like everyone else, I was reading the papers
about the development of the epidemic and I was watching it grow
exponentially. John Krebbs and I drew together a group of scientists
who were involved in epidemiological modelling, virologists and
veterinary scientists, and we began modelling the epidemic and
it was very clear from our modelling that the control processes
in place at that time were not going to bring the epidemic under
control. From the modelling, we came up with a new control procedure
and this was then backed by the Prime Minister. I think this is
an example where challenge is important and, if you take a current
example, it is on avian flu and the potential for a human flu
pandemic, so again my role is to see that challenge occurs to
government departments to see that whatever policies are being
developed are fully robust and can take that scientific challenge.
Q25 Dr Turner: Are you now confident
that all the scientific departments that do have CSAs in them
now have the in-house expertise to be able to respond to such
challenges that could occur unforeseeably in any department? Have
they now got it? Are you confident?
Professor Sir David King: No.
Q26 Dr Turner: So you think there
is work to be done?
Professor Sir David King: Yes.
That is a very good question and of course I think there is an
enormous amount of work still to be done. I think we have moved
a long way, but this is a bit of a tanker that needs turning to
get a full understanding of what the strength of scientific knowledge
can bring to the evidence-based system.
Q27 Dr Iddon: I have been putting
down a series of questions to the major state departments along
the lines of secondments into the departments. I have been asking
the departments, "Of all the secondments you are making into
the department", and there are a lot of them in some cases,
"how much scientific and technological expertise are you
importing into your department?" Amazingly, the answers coming
back, though I have not had a complete set of answers yet, but
two or three answers are the same, that they do not measure that
kind of thing. Do you find that astonishing that, when staff are
seconded from other areas of the country into state departments,
they do not measure how much technology and scientific expertise
they are importing?
Professor Sir David King: I am
not surprised at your discovering this, I am not surprised at
all. It is a problem, but at the same time I think what have got
to recognise is that the science advisory system within government
only works by going out for expert information outside of government.
There is within several departments, and Defra would be one, the
MoD another, an enormous amount of scientific knowledge base within
the department, but even there they are strengthened by going
out to be challenged by the science base outside. Therefore, I
think we can manage the process, despite what you are saying,
by getting across the idea that it is seeking external scientific
advice that is absolutely crucial, and here I mean social science
as well.
Q28 Dr Turner: Do you have a view
on the desirability of the three government departments who do
not have chief scientific advisers? Do you think they should have
chief scientific advisers or at least, in the case of the Treasury,
perhaps technological advisers? We might not then have some of
the problems that we have with the Revenue and tax credits if
they had, for instance.
Professor Sir David King: After
the foot and mouth disease epidemic, the Prime Minister asked
me to see that each government department appointed a chief scientific
adviser so that the quality of advice could be improved. He asked
me to review the quality of advice in each government department
on a regular basis and to see that each department had a science
and innovation unit, and we are delivering on that. The Department
of Culture, Media and Sport, for example, I think was somewhat
resistant to the idea that they needed a chief scientist, but
they are now in the process of appointing one. I think there have
been battles on each occasion really.
Q29 Dr Iddon: I find it surprising
that the Department for Education and Skills, which obviously
has a very broad scientific and technological base, does not have
a chief scientific adviser. Have you put any pressure on that
Department to encourage them to appoint somebody?
Professor Sir David King: Professor
Alan Wilson does play a key role in DfES, so, although he is not
officially a chief scientific adviser, I think he does play that
role reasonably well. Sue, do you know exactly what his title
is?
Ms Duncan: No.
Chairman: Director General of Higher
Education.
Q30 Dr Turner: Sue, what part do
you play, as a sociologist, in overseeing the use in your science
of the evidence base in government departments, like obviously
the DWP and the Department of Health?
Ms Duncan: Like Sir David's network
of chief scientific advisers, I have a network of the most senior
social researchers within each government department. They have
various titles, but it is usually something like `Chief Research
Officer' or `Chief Social Researcher', something like that. They
are my main route through to departments and they are the people
to whom I issue advice and guidance, written advice and guidance,
and they, in their turn, come to me if they have specific problems,
which they cannot take up themselves and then I can take them
up on their behalf. I have regular meetings with my heads of profession,
I also have a sub-group of my heads of profession, which is called
the `GSR Strategy Board', and we together set the strategy for
the Government Social Research service. Those senior researchers
within departments are themselves responsible for the quality
of research within their departments. I get called in if they
cannot deal with things themselves.
Q31 Chairman: Are you happy with
the quality that is coming out?
Ms Duncan: Of research?
Q32 Chairman: Of research.
Ms Duncan: In some areas the quality
is very good. In other areas we need to address that.
Q33 Chairman: Would you like to say
an area where you need to address it?
Ms Duncan: I think one of the
problems that we face is that, in the last five or 10 years, the
Government Social Research service has grown very rapidly which
means we have a lot of very inexperienced staff coming into government.
They are both at the beginning of their social research careers
and they are also not experienced in working in government and
giving advice to policy-makers. Therefore, to address this we
have established a competency framework which sets out precisely
what skills we expect of our staff on recruitment and through
the process of their career and we also provide guidance to them
in the development of their career.
Q34 Chairman: But you have not answered
the question—is there an area where it is particularly weak?
It is across the board?
Ms Duncan: Well, there are two
ways of answering that. What I was trying to get at was the fact
that across departments there are a lot of junior staff. In terms
of areas where the research expertise is weak, I would say, for
example, the Health and Safety Executive which has only had a
chief research officer for two years and they now have eight researchers,
but they are still developing that relationship with policy and
with the scientists in their department. Defra, in the various
government reorganisations, was left with no social researchers.
It is now in the process of developing its social research expertise
and it now has a chief research officer and a number of researchers
and it is still recruiting. Those are two areas where I would
say there is still work to be done to make sure they have proper
social science representation.
Professor Sir David King: If I
can just go back very quickly to Dr Iddon's question, the Chief
Scientist from DfES is John Elliott and he serves on the Chief
Scientific Adviser's Committee. He is a social scientist.
Q35 Dr Turner: You obviously both
get involved in the negotiations around the comprehensive spending
reviews. Do you think that your hand would be strengthened if
you actually had the Chief Scientific Adviser resident in the
Treasury?
Professor Sir David King: We have
had very good relationships with the Treasury, so both my personal
relationship with the Chief Secretary, successive chief secretaries,
and also with the civil servants who were given the task to work
with us successively, Harry Bush and John Kingman, the relationships
have been very good. Of course you might have noticed that the
science budget has increased in successive years over all previous
spending reviews, so the answer to your question is that I have
no complaints in that area.
Q36 Mr Newmark: Should all departments
follow Defra's example of setting up the independent Scientific
Advisory Council?
Professor Sir David King: I think
in many ways Defra has become an example of best practice for
other departments in setting up the Science Advisory Council as
an independent body. In placing the Chief Scientific Adviser,
Howard Doulton, on top of the evidence-based policy advice system
within Defra and in the way that he reports regularly to the Secretary
of State, I think that Defra has become, as I say, a model of
good practice.
Q37 Mr Newmark: Do you think it should
become compulsory or not?
Professor Sir David King: Well,
the word `compulsory' implies that somebody has the power to step
into different government departments and wave a wand. I am trying
to do that.
Q38 Mr Newmark: In terms of the balance
of these committees, do you feel that that is important?
Professor Sir David King: The
balance of?
Q39 Mr Newmark: The committees themselves.
Professor Sir David King: The
science advisory committees?
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