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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