Examination of Witnesses (Questions 575-579)
DAME DEIRDRE
HUTTON AND
DR ANDREW
WADGE
10 MAY 2006
Q575 Chairman: Good morning everybody
and welcome to this session which is part of our broader inquiry
looking at scientific advice to government, how government gets
its advice and whether it acts upon it, how it assesses risk and
we particularly welcome this morning Dame Deirdre Hutton, the
Chair of the Food Standards Agency, welcome to you and to Dr Andrew
Wadge, the Director of Food Safety Policy and Acting Chief Scientist,
which is a mouthful, but you are very welcome too, Andrew, to
our Committee. Can I say that we are particularly pleased to have
you in front of us this morning because the Food Standards Agency
comes with an excellent reputation in terms of the way in which
it does handle advice and the way in which it presents advice
to the Government and to the public at large, so we are very,
very pleased to have you. Why do you think you have got such a
good reputation and is it deserved?
Dame Deirdre Hutton: Well obviously
it is, yes, is the place to start. I think there are several reasons
for it. I should say first that I think the Agency bases everything
it does on science, and on sound science, but alongside that at
the same time as we are assessing the science we also talk to
a whole range of other stakeholders, so that process of collecting
the science, talking to stakeholders about their appetite for
risk, is a process that goes on simultaneously, so it means that
we are getting, as it were, a sense from both sides, so from the
science we get what the risks are and where the uncertainties
are and alongside that we talk to the public, so I think it is
a combination of good science and absolute transparency. If I
think about the past, I think the thing that the Agency has brought
that is new and I think has helped that reputation is the absolute
transparency with which we operate both within the board, the
staff, but also within the independent scientific committees,
so we are seen to base it on science, we are seen to have good
independent science, we talk to the public, we come to a view
and it is all done in the public domain and I think that is probably
the basis of it.
Q576 Chairman: Would you agree, Andrew?
Dr Wadge: Very much so, and I
think it is interesting to compare and contrast with how it was.
I used to work in the Department of Health before moving into
the Food Standards Agency and I worked on food along with colleagues
in the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food and I think
that the policy there was to conduct science and then put the
science out into the public domain and then very much retreat
behind the barricades, whereas the approach now is very much discuss
and engage with stakeholders and with the media right the way
through the process, even though sometimes that can be quite uncomfortable,
in the long run it leads to greater understanding of our position
and what the science is saying.
Q577 Chairman: I will come back to
that later because we want to explore that with you. You have
just recently been appointed; what would be the difference between
your approach and that of Sir John Krebs, because you are not
a scientist?
Dame Deirdre Hutton: I am not
a scientist, no. I think several things have happened in a sense
since I have been there and I will come back to the "I'm
not a scientist". First of all, if you are going to have
a sound scientific base as the fundament of your organisation
then all the processes within the organisation need to be directed
towards that, so I am not a scientist, but nor do I think that
science should somehow be held by one person and that one person
should somehow be it, so what we have done in the last little
while is put a huge amount of effort into developing what, in
a general sense, we are terming scientific governance, so that
has been about looking at the way in which science is governed
throughout the Agency in terms of the collection of evidence,
the use of evidence, for example, it is about the science strategy,
which Andrew knows about in great detail. It has been about best
practice, working with our nine independent scientific advisory
committees. The operation of openness that I was talking about
and indeed the appointment of Andrew as Acting Chief Scientist,
which we initially did partly because our last Chief Executive
was a scientist and we felt we wanted to separate the role of
Chief Scientist from Chief Executive because, it seemed to me,
there was conflict of interest there.
Q578 Chairman: I will return to that
issue, but I really just want to explore with you what is going
to be different between you and Sir John Krebs?
Dame Deirdre Hutton: I think what
is different in a sense is that I bring a different set of skills.
Q579 Chairman: What do you bring
then?
Dame Deirdre Hutton: What I bring
is a very considerable experience of regulation and how you work
regulation in a contemporary world. I have worked with the Financial
Services Authority as Deputy Chair for some considerable time
and I was on the board before that and I have also worked with
the Better Regulation Task Force, now Commission, so I bring a
very broad regulatory experience, I bring very broad experience
of consumer policy and I have worked on and off with the food
industry for a very long time so, you know, there are a range
of skills that you need to make the agency work and I think those
are the ones that I bring, but of course because that is what
I bring, I have been very keen to offset the ones I do not bring
by making sure that we have good processes for science within
the Agency because it needs to continue absolutely to be based
on sound science.
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