Select Committee on Science and Technology Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60-79)

PROFESSOR SIR DAVID KING AND MS SUE DUNCAN

15 FEBRUARY 2006

  Q60  Dr Harris: Before I do that, I was just struck by your expression "independent" scientific adviser. The Government says that you are there to give independent advice. This is not a criticism, but would it be fair to say that someone employed by the person they are advising could never be seen to be truly independent?

  Professor Sir David King: Of course I am appointed by the Head of the Civil Service so I do not know if you are referring there to the Head of the Civil Service or the Prime Minister.

  Q61  Dr Harris: I would like you to comment on whether you think you are as independent—let us take chief scientific officers within departments, who are not career civil servants, they are there on contract to that department, as a better example. They may give independent advice, and I am not suggesting they do not, but they could not possibly be described as "independent".

  Professor Sir David King: If I may answer your question in this way: partly as a result of the BSE crisis, followed by foot-and-mouth disease, both very expensive national crises, the position of the science advisorial system within government had fallen in terms of public confidence, and so when I came into government the first documents I read were the Phillips Commission report into the BSE crisis, and it became absolutely clear to me that the Chief Scientific Adviser needed to establish that the science advice that was given was independent advice. The politicians can then make decisions on the basis of that advice, and they may choose to ignore it, but the advice system should be independent of the political flavour of the moment. So this means that I have positioned myself to gain the confidence of the public, but of course I also have to have the confidence of the political system, so my advice has to be given in a very careful manner. In other words, I really do have to make sure that the evidence has been very carefully sifted on all of the advice that I give. The advice is put into to public domain after it has been put into the political system so that there is always that cross-check. Now, I think the phrase "independent science advice" is contained in that description—that the science advice should not be driven by political convenience

  Q62  Dr Harris: I was just questioning there could easily be a distinction made between independent adviser and advice, particularly in those circumstances. If I could give one more example. The Chief Medical Officer was in a position where he considered resignation when his advice, based on evidence, was not at that time (although last night clearly it was) followed on smoking in public places. Most people when they publish something and put something into the public domain and give advice, do not really have to think whether they are going to be able to pay their mortgage if it is ignored. That may be unavoidable, and it is certainly not a personal criticism, absolutely not, I think he was right to say what he said and say what he considered, but that clearly does mean that people in this position (which is analogous to ours and other scientific advisers) do have these other pressures on them. Do you accept that?

  Professor Sir David King: Yes, but at the same time I do not believe that it is necessary to say that I would resign if my advice was not followed. In other words, I think the system is open to saying, "No, given other factors, we have decided not to follow that advice."

  Q63  Dr Harris: I think you are right, so long as it is clear that the advice was not followed. Coming to this question of the use of evidence, the question is your guidelines on scientific analysis and policy making—and we have had a look at them and they are, I think, well-received generally across the scientific area—is how far do you think they are being implemented? Other than your in-depth science reviews in the areas in which you are doing them, what mechanisms do you have to audit whether the guidance you are giving here is being followed?

  Professor Sir David King: The main audit is the one that you have referred to, which is the reviews. In other words, government departments are very large bodies and the business of reviewing the advice system in government departments is a detailed process. What we intend to do is go into every government department approximately every three years, but each review is a six-month process, it is in-depth, and we will go fairly randomly through the process to see whether the advice system engages research and development, whether internal or external, that it is fit for purpose, that it is high quality, and whether the advice that is derived in that way does go through the advisorial system. In other words, whether the advice actually gets to the minister. Without the review process, I think it would be very difficult.

  Q64  Dr Harris: I think my colleague, Dr Turner, is going to ask you more about the reviews. I would like to ask Sue, if I may, how far are you aware that social researchers in government are aware of these guidelines and what can be done and what has been done to promote their implementation outside of these in-depth science reviews for social researchers?

  Ms Duncan: I would be surprised if any of the chief social researchers were not aware of the guidance. As well as OST sending it out to departments, I sent it out through my networks as well, and one of the key challenges for researchers in departments is to balance that role between technical data collection and analysis and actually using that research to advise in the policy process. We have done a number of things to try and facilitate that. There was a report[1] produced by the Performance and Innovation Unit in, I think, about 2000 which actually pointed up this issue of using advice effectively within government on the social science side, both from the supply side and the demand side. What we have been doing on the supply side is spelling out to all social researchers within government departments what we expect of them in playing that quite difficult role between being a professional researcher and being an adviser on your area of research expertise, and particularly in developing training on communication skills, which both helps them to develop skills in communicating technical information in a simple way and also helps them with that difficult role of knowing how far you can go with the evidence in those sorts of grey areas.

  Professor Sir David King: Could I come back to your question just with an added comment, which is in setting out the new version of the chief scientific advisers' guidelines we made a full consultation through the chief scientific advisers' committee with all government departments, so it was not simply a top-down process, it was a process where the original guidelines had been implemented and we were now looking to improve them on the basis of practice in all government departments, so there has been feedback and the new guidelines have taken that into account.

  Q65  Dr Harris: I have two specific questions on the guidelines. In paragraph 22 it says "experts"—these are experts from whom departments get advice—"should not be expected to take into account potential political reaction to their findings before presenting them." That is very sensible. Does that apply to advisers as well because it does not say that? Does "experts" include the departmental science advisers or only the experts who feed into the Chief Scientific Adviser, who feeds it on to policy makers?

  Professor Sir David King: That particular statement refers to the experts and not the chief scientific advisers but I would say exactly the same applies to chief scientific advisers.

  Q66  Dr Harris: You say in paragraph 14 that the "declaration of interests of experts could undermine the credibility or independence of the advice". Credibility as judged by whom? In other words, if someone is not credible with certain NGOs, is that sufficient, is that what is being meant by that?

  Professor Sir David King: I think in a sense it could mean somebody who declares an interest through their business interests. My view—and let me try and be clear on this—is that if you were to take a position where "your interests are going to draw you into taking a position on this issue, therefore we cannot have you", you would end up removing a large number of the best experts in the country from many issues. So what we need to do is put out there for discussion—

  Q67  Dr Harris: Agreed, yes.

  Professor Sir David King: —exactly what those declared interests are, but once we have declared that, I think the position becomes a lot easier to deal with.

  Q68  Dr Harris: You have not answered my question. My question is what is the threshold for credibility whereby you would say that the advice will be credible, because on that basis—

  Professor Sir David King: It is a good question and I have yet to find an example that I could give you.

  Q69  Dr Harris: Because you could argue that any scientist working full time for an NGO where it requires there to be concern about and opposition to a policy might fall into that category, but there are plenty of them on government bodies, for example?

  Professor Sir David King: But if I take the GM Science Review, on that group there was an expert from the industry who knew the GM industry from inside and there were experts from the NGOs, so by knowing what the declared interests are, I think you can begin to balance the Committee out. As I say, I cannot give you an example where somebody was disqualified on the basis of this. I think the most important thing is having the declared interests.

  Dr Harris: I agree.

  Q70  Dr Turner: The science reviews that are carried out on different departments, have you got any generic lessons from these or are they all quite different?

  Professor Sir David King: I think one generic lesson is that the existence of the science reviews begins to develop best practice in departments even before we arrive, so there are departments which might try and persuade me to delay the review because they want to put things right, and that in itself is not necessarily a bad thing. I think it is difficult to reach generic conclusions at this stage. For example, DCMS is the completed review and DCMS has this very large number of arms' length bodies that they fund, quite unlike any other government department, so looking for generic issues at this time is probably a little difficult.

  Q71  Dr Turner: Your reviews encompass social science input into the departments as well, I take it?

  Professor Sir David King: Yes, as I have said, Sue Duncan helps me in that.

  Q72  Dr Turner: If you feel that a department is not taking your advice as an outcome of the reviews, what leverage do you have to persuade them? What did you have to do to DCMS to convince them that they should appoint a chief scientific adviser? Did you have to take them outside and kick them?

  Professor Sir David King: The answer to your question is that, in effect, the Treasury is very interested in the process that we are going through. In other words, the Treasury is of course keen to see that there is good value for money in the advice-driven process, and so when we look at the spending review it includes the funds required for the R&D base to improve the science evidence for each government department, and the Treasury now works with my Office on each of those spending review applications from government departments where science and social sciences are included. So in other words, there is a financial factor that, as you might imagine, is quite an important factor in all of this. The Treasury is one important element, but of course the second element is that the drive comes from the Prime Minister to improve the quality of the evidence base.

  Q73  Dr Turner: Have you encountered any need to encourage cultural changes in departments to properly accommodate scientific input? I suppose I can think of DFID as a potential type of example to which you might want to refer.

  Professor Sir David King: Absolutely. When I talk about the "tanker being turned around", I am talking about a culture change in which the notion of science advice being relevant to a wide range of topics is not always present in government departments and I would say has been rather thin in the past. In other words, science has been seen to be a very small part of the evidence-based advice system and we are simply saying actually there are few areas where the science knowledge base does not impact on improving evidence across the system. So I think that is a culture change.

  Chairman: We are going to move on to Adam Afriyie who has been very patient sat there.

  Q74  Adam Afriyie: It has been fascinating, I have enjoyed every moment but I am slightly worried because right at this moment there is a risk that the ceiling may collapse and we may all be horribly injured in the next 10 minutes. Do you think we should clear the room?

  Professor Sir David King: You are telling me that there is a risk that this ceiling might collapse?

  Q75  Adam Afriyie: There is a risk there. There is a risk that it may happen in the next 10 minutes. What I really want to bring us on to is the subject of risk and the perception and the communication of it, because, as you can see, it is quite an alarming if communicated ineffectively or in a deliberately excitable fashion by the media. My first question really is do government departments have sufficient expertise in risk assessment and do you have measures that you use to fathom whether or not they are achieving those standards or that expertise?

  Professor Sir David King: Let me first say that, as you probably know, the Treasury leads on managing risk. It has the managing risk framework and I am sure you will ask the Treasury about this. May I quote from the Prime Minister's speech of 26 May 2005. He said in his speech on Risk and the State: "We cannot eliminate risk; we have to live with it and manage it." I think this is your point about the ceiling falling down. I would say that most of my work is in the category of managing risk. If you take the tsunami, in that post-tsunami period it was a matter of looking at risks around the world from natural disasters and how we can manage them.

  Q76  Adam Afriyie: In the government departments do you feel that there is sufficient understanding of not just the risks or sufficient expertise to assess those risks, but also the ability to to assess them consistently across the various government departments?

  Professor Sir David King: I think the quality of practice varies from one government department to another. I think you are quite right to raise it, but this is precisely why the Prime Minister made the speech on this because we want to raise the profile of the quality of risk analysis and risk management.

  Ms Duncan: Perhaps I could just come in there, Sir David. The Treasury does provide a framework guidance which is used by departments which sets a clear structure on how they appraise risk, and that is used by departments.

  Q77  Adam Afriyie: And it would seem to me that everybody perceives risk. In the social sciences there is also the concept of stress and stress caused to people and whether it is internally generated or whether it is a reality of the environment. When it comes to risk it seems to me that surely it would be fairly straightforward to create a standardised table of risks that people understand in their daily lives so that when something is communicated, it is compared to something which people generally understand. That is one way of keeping a consistent way of communicating risk to the public. Is there a table like this—you have alluded to something similar in terms of the assessment of risk, Sue—but is there a table like that that could be used when communicating the risk of certain outcomes taking place?

  Professor Sir David King: The best table along this direction is really produced by the life insurance industry in terms of the added risk to yourself of different lifestyle habits or occupations. Again, if I may refer to that vote last night, smoking is absolutely at the top of the list of risks, so a life insurance agency will ask you just two questions: Are you male or female? because females outlive males, on average, and Do you smoke? because the risk to your life from smoking is so far above all the other major risks that we face. So, yes, the tables are there but the risk perception, as we all know, is that if there is an accident on the road and several people are killed, there will be zero publicity attached to it, but if there is a rail accident, there will be a large amount of publicity attached to it. So the focus goes on dealing with risk on the rail rather than the road.

  Q78  Adam Afriyie: Can I just confirm, is there a consistent method across government departments to assess risk which is used in a standardised way across all government departments? Does that sort of methodology exist and is it being used?

  Ms Duncan: That is the Treasury appraisal guidance which I mentioned earlier. You pointed to the issue of the communication of risk and there are five principles set out by the Chancellor which underpin the approach to risk. One of those is public involvement. To support the guidance issued by the Treasury, the Head of the Government Communication Service has also issued guidance for departments to follow in communicating risk and it is very much a recognition of the importance of how that is communicated to the public which is an important element of it.

  Q79  Chairman: We are hopelessly unsuccessful, are we not? The Daily Mail is far more successful in communicating risk than the Government is?

  Ms Duncan: I think I would say it depends if you want a real communication of risk, a balanced communication of risk or—


1   Note by the witness: Cabinet Office (2000), `Adding it up: Improving Analysis and Modelling in Central Government', available at http://www.strategy.gov.uk/downloads/su/adding/coiaddin.pdf Back


 
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