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CORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 900-ix House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY COMMITTEE
SCIENTIFIC ADVICE, RISK AND EVIDENCE: HOW THE GOVERNMENT HANDLES THEM
Wednesday 24 May 2006 DR RICHARD PIKE, PROFESSOR MARTIN TAYLOR, DR CAROLINE WALLACE and DR PETER COTGREAVE PROFESSOR TIM HOPE, MR NORMAN GLASS and MR WILLIAM SOLESBURY Evidence heard in Public Questions 924 - 1019
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the Science and Technology Committee on Wednesday 24 May 2006 Members present Mr Phil Willis, in the Chair Mr Robert Flello Dr Evan Harris Dr Brian Iddon Margaret Moran Mr Brooks Newmark Bob Spink Dr Desmond Turner
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Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Dr Richard Pike, Chief Executive, Royal Society of Chemistry, Professor Martin Taylor, Physical Secretary and Vice-President, Royal Society, Royal Society of Chemistry, Dr Caroline Wallace, Science Policy Advisor, Biosciences Federation, and Dr Peter Cotgreave, Director, Campaign for Science and Engineering, gave evidence.
Chairman: Good morning, everyone. Can I apologise to our learned and distinguished visitors for a slight delay this morning. We were trying to agree the heads of our report on MRI scanners and the European Directive before you came in. Could we welcome Dr Richard Pike, the Chief Executive from the Royal Society of Chemistry; nice to see you again Richard, Professor Martin Taylor, the Physical Secretary and Vice-President of the Royal Society, Royal Society of Chemistry; good morning to you, Dr Caroline Wallace, the Science Policy Advisor for Biosciences Federation; good morning to you, and Dr Peter Cotgreave, the Director of the Campaign for Science and Engineering; nice to see you again, Peter. As you are the neutral on this panel, though you are never neutral on anything, could we invite you to chair your panel if you want to direct questions. The purpose of this first part of the session is to try and explore the role of the learned societies and the way in which the campaigning organisations give evidence to governments and the way in which government uses scientific evidence in policy making. This is part of our broad sweep programme which is looking at this whole issue of evidence-based policy. Dr Iddon: Chairman, before we begin can I declare an interest in that I am a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry. Q924 Chairman: Thank you very much indeed. Martin, perhaps I could start with you by saying it is clearly important that in order for the Government to be an intelligent customer of scientific information it has to have sufficient capacity to become an intelligent customer. Do you agree, and do you think it is? Professor Taylor: I think it is developing capacity. It needs to learn to interact with all the learned societies, and the Royal Society in particular, a little bit more. If I may speak for the Royal Society for a minute, I think we are a very great resource. We have not just got our fellowship that covers expertise in all science but also all our various contacts, networks, including networks overseas. This is something superb for the Government to be able to draw from and I do not think, to be honest, they draw from us quite enough. Q925 Chairman: I will come back to that point but what I am really asking the panel here is, do you feel ----- Professor Taylor: Do you mean within Government? Q926 Chairman: I think you have huge expertise in terms of the learned societies and in terms of Peter's organisation as a campaigning group for science and engineering, but do you feel that in order to be an intelligent customer the Government has sufficient capacity within it to be able to be an intelligent customer? Professor Taylor: Can I be absolutely sure I understand the question, having gone off slightly on the way I saw the question in the first instance? Do you mean the scientific expertise within Government? Q927 Chairman: I think in order to go to Marks and Spencer's to get the appropriate clothes for your children first of all you have to have some ability to know their size and what it is that you want. Does the Government itself have within it the capacity to know what sort of scientific information it needs and to be able to judge that? Professor Taylor: The first part of my first answer was spot on in that regard. This is an increasing entity. We welcome greatly the fact that there are now Chief Scientific Advisers, I think, in the majority of the departments, if not all, and this has helped bring scientific understanding into the departments, but that in itself also needs building up. I do not know all the departments' cases but I am thinking in particular of Defra and the MoD where I am aware of Scientific Advisory Councils in addition to the CSAs and this has certainly helped build up the capacity. It is something we welcome. I can pick on Defra because we know Defra very well. We have done some reviews for them and we are quite impressed at the way they are starting to use their Scientific Advisory Council. Q928 Chairman: So it is sort of five out of ten? Professor Taylor: Actually I would go a little higher. Q929 Chairman: Six then. Professor Taylor: I would say six plus because it is on the way up. Q930 Chairman: Caroline and then Peter? Dr Wallace: Defra is one of the Government departments that we deal with a lot and we gave evidence on that. I would agree with Martin that it is work in progress. We were concerned that funding cuts have resulted in scientists being employed on short-term contracts within Defra. Also, merit promotion has been taken out of career progression within core Defra and there is a perception now that to progress in your career you move policy area every 18 months or so, so no-one is in one policy area for more than two years which makes it difficult for people to horizon scan. Yes, Defra have got their Scientific Advisory Council. They have also started a series of seminars where they have external speakers and they are putting into place a continuing professional development scheme which the Institute of Biology have advised them on but as yet they are not using the values for career progression. Q931 Chairman: So, Peter, Defra is okay but the rest is not so good? Dr Cotgreave: As Professor Taylor has said, the situation is getting better and members of this committee in the last Parliament will remember the International Development Department, for example, not having a Chief Scientific Adviser. This committee pressed very hard for that to happen and now they have one and I think he is doing good work, but it is not true that all departments yet have one. Only yesterday Mr Lamy and Lord Sainsbury appeared before a House of Lords committee talking about Culture, Media and Sport and conceded that that department probably should get itself a Chief Scientific Adviser because it deals with a lot of scientific issues. It has the Natural History Museum, the Science Museum and the British Library but it is also responsible for the Olympics and sports science is going to be important if we are going to win any medals in 2012, so they conceded that there was a case for having one there. However, I think one needs to look not just at the top level of Chief Scientific Advisers and Advisory Councils but also at the lower level, the daily grind of making policy on a daily basis. I would make a distinction between high profile issues where everyone is in a panic and the press are all up in arms and we are all going to die tomorrow, like BSE or bird flu where I think there has been a lot of progress. People see Dave King on the television talking about bird flu and they feel, "He is a man who knows what he is talking about and I trust him and he is being honest with me", and on the other hand there are the rather more boring day-to-day things that are not going to catch the headlines but where good policy, in order for taxpayers to get good value for the money they are spending on policy, is informed by science and by evidence. Just today on the front page of the Financial Times there is a piece about a National Audit Office report on the Small Business Service and it says that policy planning is difficult because the way the Small Business Service operates it is impossible to know what measures are effective because they are not doing what a scientist would do and measuring the effects of different interventions and comparing them. At the top level things are getting better although there is still a way to go, but lower down there is still, I think, a very long way to go. Q932 Chairman: Richard, do you concur with those conclusions, that we have a long way to go but we have made a good start? Dr Pike: There is some way to go. I guess I come here having been in the Royal Society of Chemistry for just three months. I have seen some government operations but I have also seen a lot of activity before that, so what I would like to suggest is this. There is a definite process in the way that scientific evidence is accumulated or acquired by a government, be it this Government or other governments, and the way in which it deals with that and disseminates the outcomes. My own experience, both in the UK and abroad, is that the first step in this process is that you have staff within a government department who have reached a basic minimum level of understanding of the science associated with the activity of that department. Therefore, while it can be a very good idea to have a chief scientist in a department, be it in the UK or elsewhere, what is crucial is that there is a training programme which means that all the staff of that department are aware of the key issues, the key aspects of science and the key numbers so that when matters come in, be they questions or issues that they observe in the outside world, even at the very basic level antennae go up, as it were, and there is a process by which issues are elevated. Q933 Chairman: I do not think we would disagree with that. The question I am asking is on the evidence which the Royal Society of Chemistry gave to this committee was "a problem concerning the nature and adequacy of the in-house expertise in government departments". Dr Pike: That is really what I am addressing. Q934 Chairman: You feel that is the case? Dr Pike: That is what I am addressing. Q935 Chairman: I wonder if I could turn to you, Dr Wallace. The Biosciences Federation told us that good policy-making in government depends on a "strong scientific culture within departments". What do you mean by that and do we have it? Dr Wallace: I do not think we have it as yet, like Peter said, at the lower levels. I think that policy staff need to be encouraged to maintain their awareness of current issues and there should be a programme in place where they continue to attend seminar series, et cetera. That would be our main point, that there is not really that scientific culture at the lower levels, although they may have very good Chief Scientific Advisers and Advisory Councils. Q936 Chairman: Why do you think that is? Dr Wallace: Again, it is because of the way that career progression is within Defra - I cannot comment on the other government departments but I do not know if there is any difference - in that the policy staff move around all the time. There is no staying in one position and being recognised for being good in that position. Q937 Dr Iddon: If you were the responsible person in a ministry setting up an advisory committee for the first time how would you ensure that you had the right balance on that committee? Professor Taylor: I would consult widely in the first instance. I would say, "Go out and get a lot of independent advice". Obviously, I would say, "Go to the Royal Society". I would say, "Go to all the learned societies, get your advice and form your own opinion from that". It is really important to get the right people and possibly international experts on Science Advisory Councils where possible. The net should be cast wide. Dr Cotgreave: I think it depends to some extent whether you mean an advisory council on a specific subject, such as the Advisory Council on the Release of Organisms into the Environment or something like that, in which case what you need on that are the best scientists specifically knowledgeable in that field. As Martin says, they might be anywhere in the world and you need to go to the Royal Society, the Biosciences Federation, the Royal Society of Chemistry, institutes, wherever they are, and make sure that you have, in the judgment of the scientific community that needs to respect this committee, the best people. If you are looking for a more general advisory board for a department then I think you probably need to look at different people. You need people who are in some sense generalists, people who can pick up different subjects, people who have contacts in a wide range, people like Dave King, in fact, who has to do this on a daily basis and is very good at it. It would depend on the nature of the committee you were setting up but if it was going to be a scientific advisory committee it must have the respect of the scientific community. The only way you would achieve that would be by getting really high quality scientists onto it. Q938 Dr Iddon: With either model do you think there is a place for either a lobby group or even a lay person to sit on one of those advisory committees? Dr Cotgreave: Yes, I think there is, as long as it is clear that that is what they are, a lobby group or a lay person and that is where their voice is coming from. I do not have a problem with people who have other opinions or who come from a different way of thinking. I do not want to gag anyone or stop them having their say, so yes, I think there is certainly room for that as long as everyone is clear that that is what they are and that their opinion will be informed in a different way from the opinions of scientists. Q939 Dr Iddon: Have you any other comments, Richard? Dr Pike: I think with these committees it can sometimes be very useful - and maybe we are alluding to it here - to have one or two people who have the wider picture. In other words, you can imagine that, if you are not careful, if you just have a lot of specialists focusing on their own areas, there may be some tunnel vision and you need one or two generalists, I think, to try to be the glue. The other very important point I would make is that the chairman is crucial and the conduct of the meetings is also crucial. There has to be, certainly in the early stages, the more open questions - the what, the why, the how, why is this consistent with that, why is that inconsistent with this. It is a combination of structure and process. Fundamentally you need to figure out where this committee meeting features in the overall process. What is the outcome down the road? How will recommendations be implemented? When a committee is set up the process has to be thought through all the way to final delivery. Q940 Dr Iddon: Defra has set up an independent Scientific Advisory Council. Is that a model that should be replicated across state departments, do you think? Professor Taylor: It seems to be working very well and that is what I was speaking to, some kind of standing council, when I was saying that you really want to cast the net wide and bring in experts. When you move down to specific issues I agree completely with what my colleagues have said, how important it is then to start to engage perhaps with lobby groups, to see how the public see the formulation of the issues. When we had our nano-technology report jointly with the Royal Academy of Engineering one of its great successes was to engage with the public right upstream. I would say that at that level yes, you should engage with others, but for the model from Defra, which I admire greatly since you ask, the important thing was experts and I would like to see others copy it. It has to be properly resourced as well. We have had some complaints from some of the scientific advisers that when they try to set things up they are not always properly resourced. Dr Cotgreave: I think it is important also not just that it is properly resourced but also that it is resourced in a way that makes it clear it is independent so that if the people on that committee disagree with a decision a minister takes they can say so openly and why that is happening. I think that is probably the way the Defra one is working. Q941 Dr Iddon: Caroline, you have had some dealings with this, have you? Dr Wallace: Yes. I think the Scientific Advisory Council is a great model. I would agree that if you are getting down towards specific issues it would be really important to have a lobby group or lay person on the committee to reflect a range of opinion. Chairman: Martin, when the Royal Society gave evidence to us they were scathing about the use of lay people on the scientific committees, just going back to an earlier point. "Elevating public opinion over professional expertise and subordinating science to prejudice" was the comment that the Royal Society made. Dr Harris: No; that was from Professor Grimston of Chatham House. Q942 Chairman: Sorry; that was from Chatham. My apologies; I am confusing you with Professor Grimston's evidence, but you obviously do not feel that that is right. Professor Taylor: No. I do not want to waste time. I have tried to make my point and I think for a standing advisory council the important thing is expertise, but when you come to specifics you should engage with the public and lobby groups and do it early on as well to help them help you frame the issues. Q943 Dr Harris: Dr Cotgreave just said that he saw no problem with lay members of scientific advisory committees. I was listening carefully. Dr Cotgreave: Might I clarify what I said? Q944 Dr Harris: You can in a moment - and indeed NGOs. Maybe you should clarify it because the Royal Society of Chemistry were pretty clear in their evidence about what they thought of NGO representation on scientific advisory committees advising on policy as opposed to the policy decision-making committee. Dr Cotgreave: I am sorry if I was unclear and I probably was, but if you are talking about an expert group of people on a scientific issue there is no place on that for someone who is not an expert in that issue. If you are talking about committees more widely there is no point in making a policy based on scientific evidence if you cannot bring the public with you, on nuclear fuel, for example. The Chief Scientific Adviser has said that whenever we build another nuclear power station we should bring the public with us. I think one has to get the balance right. Dr Harris: But that is not a scientific advisory committee. That is an art of the possible advisory committee, it is a public relations advisory committee, it is a policy considerations advisory committee. Believe me, NGOs, where policy is being made, feed in. I would like to put to you, is it not giving them two bites of the cherry plonking them on a scientific advisory committee and then they have the stream of advice and lobbying that they do? I do not think that organisations like Mobile Phone Mast Kill Association have scientists on their advisory committees that are balanced scientists. Chairman: Dr Harris is obsessed with my views on mobile phones. Q945 Dr Harris: I did not mention your views, Chairman. It was a random selection. Dr Cotgreave: Of course, there is a balance to be struck but just because one group of people with whom you and I might happen to disagree want to stifle the views of another group of people called scientists I do not think that is a reason why the scientific community should try and stifle the views of other people. I would not wish to give some rabidly zealous group on any one issue a say that they did not deserve, but you have to take a range of opinions when you are making policy. Q946 Dr Harris: How do you make a decision? That is a subjective view. Surely scientific advisory committees should be populated by people who accept the scientific method, that is, looking at independent, peer review, evidence-based findings and not prejudice. Obviously, everyone has interests. Should that not be the dividing line? Dr Cotgreave: Yes, I would not have a problem with saying that you cannot be on a Scientific Advisory Council if you openly say that peer review is a load of rubbish and the science does not work. Chairman: We could continue with this debate and the committee will when it is deliberating. Q947 Dr Iddon: I have one last simple question - well, the question is simple. For those departments that have them, noticeably not the Treasury, do you think departmental Chief Scientific Advisers have made an impact so far? Professor Taylor: A couple of instances come to mind. I always like to go to examples where I can. I think of Frank Kelly who came to Transport, a mathematician like myself. He has really had some impact on the advice there. We think of Gordon Conway going to DfID but, as I said, I have often referred to Defra as an excellent example. We think that Howard Dalton has done a very fine job there. The Scientific Advisory Committee that it has introduced has gone very well. Joining this up with your other question, the one thing that maybe he has to do a little more is to make sure that it really is embedded in all the strategic decisions. I would make that point with general Chief Scientific Advisers as well. Science should be cross-cutting. It should be embedded in everything. You cannot imagine something in the Department for Health where you should not have the scientific advice there. It is good but it needs to get better. It comes back to the question I was asked at the start. Q948 Dr Iddon: Could I have a brief response from the rest of the panel on that? Dr Cotgreave: I would associate myself strongly with those comments. I feel that Chief Scientific Advisers are having an impact and I would single out Howard Dalton as having made an impact, although he has been there longer than the others. Q949 Chairman: Of course, the Chief Scientific Advisers who have not been mentioned will note this very carefully. Dr Cotgreave: They are probably not new. Dr Pike: Our experience is good as well. What I am unclear of though is the extent to which in a sense the management processes have been embedded into their departments so that we can go through what I was talking about earlier. Q950 Chairman: And that is the point that you were making as well, Caroline? Dr Wallace: Yes, I would agree there. The Chief Scientific Advisers are a great thing. I am unclear at the moment how much individual Chief Scientific Advisers input into horizon scanning and cross-departmental issues but in theory they are a good thing. Q951 Margaret Moran: Professor Taylor, do I take it that you believe that as the UK's national academy of science you should have a more formal role in the scientific advisory process? Professor Taylor: I would like to see it more used. On the formality of it I would be open to suggestions. As we are at the moment we have various working groups and evidence sessions that help Government on policy and from time to time we are commissioned by Government, such as on the infectious diseases of livestock and jointly with the Royal Academy of Engineering for nano-technology. We are looking to expand what we do. We have got our 350th coming up. We have plans for the future. We would like to do more. Q952 Margaret Moran: Do you think the credibility of the academy in terms of giving scientific advice would be enhanced if your internal processes were more transparent in terms of electing fellows et cetera? Do you think that would help the Government give you greater credibility and interaction? Professor Taylor: We would like to think the process for electing fellows is transparent. It is the names which are kept secret. I do not see the linkage, to be quite candid. Q953 Margaret Moran: Dr Pike and Dr Wallace, we have asked the national academy of science what they think their role should be. What in an ideal world would your roles be in providing scientific advice? Dr Wallace: One of the things we say in the Biosciences Federation is that we know we are responsive. We respond to consultation and we are occasionally asked to give advice at an earlier stage but not often enough and we would like to get involved in formulating questions that go on to produce consultations. Dr Pike: From our point of view I guess the RSC represents a body that covers a wide diversity of chemistry interests and so we would certainly like to see one aspect being regarded as a one-stop shop for the chemistry sector in terms of giving advice. I think the fact that we have members who are able to give independent advice at no cost is an asset that we feel you could use. Going further down the advising process, we could also identify for you specific individuals whom you could then discuss matters with in more detail. That sort of use is the way I would see our body being used. We deal with DfID, DTI and so on on a fairly regular basis and so we are engaging with them but we feel we could advise more than we have done to date. Q954 Chairman: Do you think then that the American style national academy of sciences and their formal role as a consultee within an advisory body to both the administration and indeed Congress would be much more useful? Dr Pike: I think it would. As you are aware, we have what I will call ad hoc arrangements where we do meet people like yourselves to advise on chemistry aspects, not only to advise but also to have a feedback process to hear your views. My own view, and it is shared by a lot of other chemists, is that certainly in the future chemistry is going to play a very important role in terms of energy, the environment, sustainability and so on, and therefore some sort of more formal arrangement whereby we could deliver information and hear your views I think would benefit both parties. Q955 Margaret Moran: Dr Cotgreave, Evan started referring to some of the lobby and pressure groups. What do you think the role of NGOs and pressure groups should be in influencing scientific advice or should there be any role at all? How should Government differentiate between the different types of advice it is getting? Dr Cotgreave: That is a very good question because if you had asked me the question you asked the other witnesses I could not have answered in the same way because we are not an organisation in which you particularly have to be a good scientist to join. There are not criteria in that sense. We are a membership organisation, a group of people who happen to feel strongly on issues to do with science policy and anyone could join, and that is a very different thing from being an organisation where there are some quality professional criteria to join so we have to be treated differently. However, what we try to do as an organisation is present solid evidence. Sometimes we present opinion, sometimes we present evidence and we try to make it clear when we are doing that. Anybody who has got some serious evidence on a policy issue should be listened to. If you have something serious to say and you can back it up you cannot be ignored, I think, just because you are not a learned society, but they are different and they have to be appreciated as different things and I would not have said for the Government to come to us at an early stage. As Caroline said, you would expect the Government to come to the Institute of Biology at an early stage for advice on a lot of issues. Q956 Bob Spink: In fact, since the RSC has criticised government consultation of scientists perhaps you would care, Dr Pike, to say how the Government can improve the means by which it gets advice from the science community. Dr Pike: In a sense it follows from my earlier comments. From the point of view of the Government it is a question of being a more informed customer, as it were, in the way that I have described, but then to be more transparent in identifying the sorts of issues that are of interest to you and then coming to people like ourselves for scientific advice, and through more dialogue, I would say, between Government and ourselves we could volunteer information on the sorts of issues that we see. What we are arguing is for closer contact so that we can work collaboratively to identify issues and give scientific advice. Q957 Bob Spink: I suspect the rest of the panel agree with that. Dr Cotgreave: Could I just add something which is going back to what we said earlier on? That needs to happen not just at the top level of the Scientific Advisory Councils. It needs to be going on at the lower levels of individual civil servants working in departments on the daily grind of working on policies. I think that is the area where there is great scope. Dr Pike: One of the big problems is that from your point of view there are loads of bodies that you could talk to. In the same way, I guess, there are quite a number of government departments and entities that we could talk to. One of the big issues is how do we prioritise the way in which we interact? Even that process has to be improved. How do we focus on the priorities so that we can deliver the scientific information we want? I think it is going to come about by top-level interaction but interaction at this informed lower level as well. I guess in a sense we have both got to work at it. Professor Taylor: I would agree completely with that but with a couple of illustrations. I agree that at the high level to a certain extent the onus is a little bit on Government to try to come back to us. We have tried quite a lot to make contact with Government and I would like to see them respond a little more to our initiatives. At the lower level an issue that has not been aired properly yet to this committee is horizon scanning which is terribly important. Q958 Bob Spink: We are coming on to that in a moment. Professor Taylor: I did not know that. Should I bide my time? Chairman: I think so, yes. Q959 Bob Spink: Is it possible to promote and improve the interaction between these very tightly focused and introvert scientists and these very generalist and extrovert policy makers who are seeking a quick fix? Dr Pike: It is educational on both sides. I realise that there are scientists who can be so focused on the detail of the science that they have difficulty in communicating with the generalists. By the same token the generalists within Government need to understand some of the very basic scientific principles so that there is a dialogue. Otherwise you have meetings where ships pass in the night and there is little interaction and that is what we have to address. Q960 Bob Spink: Do you think the policy makers are too often looking for a quick fix? We will come back to risk assessment and all of that later, I am sure, but do you think that policy makers are looking for a quick fix and are not really tuned into listening to very tight and focused scientific advice? Dr Wallace: The Biosciences Federation would agree with that. Given that Government policy advisers are not in post very long within departments, they are looking for answers within a parliamentary session or within their period of contract in the department. We would say that often they are looking for a quick fix and not horizon scanning well. Q961 Dr Turner: Dr Cotgreave, you have been known to comment that there is a need to distinguish between decisions which have been based on evidence and those that are judgment calls. Dr Cotgreave: Yes. Q962 Dr Turner: Do you think the Government does this very well at present or do you think that when there is a grey area the role that scientific advice is playing in that decision should be made more transparent? Dr Cotgreave: The answer to the first question is that I do not know because the answer to the second question is yes: it needs to be more transparent and I do not know whether the Government is making those distinctions as clearly as it should because the process is not transparent. If you take something like bird flu/the dead swan in Scotland, once you know you have got a dead swan with bird flu you could do everything from, at the one end, nothing to, at the other end, killing every chicken and turkey in the UK to stop the spread. We have to do something in between those two things and you have to balance the risk that the virus will spread with the risk to the poultry industry and all the other associated risks. How you judge that balance is a political decision for a minister. How you then achieve the balance the minister wants is a scientific question and there may very well be a very grey area because the scientist may say either, "I do not know", or, "I cannot deliver what you want but I can do this or this instead". I do not think the distinction is clear enough at the moment between those judgment calls and those evidence-based scientific opinions. Q963 Dr Turner: Yes, I can think of several controversial decision-making areas where that should apply, badgers for one, new nuclear power stations for another. Dr Cotgreave: Exactly. Q964 Dr Turner: Clearly there is room for improving the decision-making process there as far as evidence collecting and evidence presentation are concerned. Dr Cotgreave: Yes, I think so. Q965 Dr Turner: Dr Pike, the Royal Society of Chemistry have had a view on this as well. Do you want to add anything? Dr Pike: What I would add is that there has to be good science in the first place in that if we take this specific example it would be good, and I am sure it would be possible, to have said internally before any messages were sent out, that there is, let us say, a five per cent probability that so many people might succumb to bird flu and there is a 90 per cent probability that it could be zero or just one. In other words, internally, and it may have gone through this process; I do not know, the science should have said, "Look: these are the sorts of probability distributions we are talking about". Get that right and then you can ask yourself, "How do I communicate that in an easily understandable way to the public?". I am not convinced that was done either. In summary, get the science right but understand probabilities. Probabilities turn up so often that it is very worrying that so few people understand what probabilities really mean. Get that right and then communicate correctly in a way that the lay public can understand. Q966 Dr Turner: Not easy. We have various methods of deriving evidence. It might be a double-blind trial or it might be simply a literature survey or there might be a gap. How do you balance this? Dr Pike: One can make judgments. We all work with imperfect data, and I guess I am generalising when I say that, but you can usually reduce a problem into a scientific context. Even if there are gaps you can derive, for example, probability distributions. It is a combination of literature searches but also good meetings. I come back to my earlier point, that if you do have a issue to do with, let us say, the probability of bird flu occurring more extensively in this country, the probability of CJD developing, you bring in experts, you do literature surveys, but most crucially you ask the right questions - the what, the how, the why, the what if, is this not inconsistent with that? There is some evidence that that does not go on as it should do because the outcome as viewed by the public is often statements which I think most scientists would say are quite incorrect or exaggerated and are worrying to the public. The outcome suggests that there is not a well defined process by which you go from the science to the public delivery of the outcome. Q967 Dr Turner: Do you think there would be a place for some recognised systematic process for weighing evidence and the approach to a problem, especially given the fact that systems are no better than the people that operate them, so it is obviously crucial on any given problem to have the right person in the right place to ask the right questions. Can you see ways so that the public can see that this is being done systematically and give them greater trust? Dr Pike: I will be very specific. I will not mention the country but in my more recent past I was working to help a state oil company in its interactions with highly specialist oil industry engineers, so there is an interesting parallel here. We have specialists dealing with, let us say, the less informed as they work within the state oil company, and what we developed was a formalised process by which information came in and was examined and implemented. That was all documented. It was all simple stuff, schematics, which meant that everybody in that state oil company department understood what would happen when information came in, what was triggered, what meetings were held, what sorts of questions were asked at meetings. It was formalised in that sense and then, having established that process, we trained the staff to work the process, gave them the skills. I see a parallel that could be applied here in government. Formalise your processes, do not over-complicate it with lots of words. Just have simple schematics, simple gate-type questions - what, why, what if - and continually train people. That is possible. I have done it and I have seen it done by other people. Then you can track the way in which the information comes in and announcements are made to the public effectively. That would be the whole process. Q968 Dr Turner: Perhaps we should incorporate this in the Civil Service college. Dr Pike: Indeed. Dr Turner: The other problem, of course, is that there is frequently a gap in knowledge. Without having extra policy-related research done you will not be able to fill that gap except by postulates. Do you think the Government is well placed to commission policy-related research? Do you think, for instance, it should ring-fence a pot within the research councils or should it be something separate? It seems to me there is a gap there. Do you think the Government should address it and, if so, how? Q969 Chairman: Could I perhaps ask you, Professor Taylor, to come in on that one? Professor Taylor: I can think of a very fine instance of that and that would be nano-technology where the effect of nano particles on the environment is something of an unknown and it could be very important indeed. What has had to happen at the moment is that we have had to try and commission research, if you like, to fill the vacuum so that the right decisions can be made. The problem is that we make these recommendations and Defra have come forward with some very good proposals demonstrating fine joined-up thinking but they have not earmarked the money. They have said that there should be research on nano particles and their effect on the environment. Nano-technology is a very fast-moving and active area. In the tensions of a competitive environment of bidding for grants something like that could come really rather low down at research councils and would probably not easily get funded. I therefore agree with what you say but it needs to be earmarked, ring-fenced money and then this whole project would be just going that little bit better, but at the moment I am afraid it is going to run into the sand. Q970 Dr Turner: So there is a gap there? Professor Taylor: There is a gap. Chairman: But Des's question was also about who should control that ring-fenced money. Should it be David King and his team? Should it be the Chief scientific Adviser? Should it be the research council? Who should control it? Q971 Bob Spink: Or the Treasury. Professor Taylor: First of all I would like to see what the relevant ministry had to say and then maybe the Government's Chief Scientific Adviser could step in if necessary. Q972 Bob Spink: Oh, can he? Professor Taylor: Yes. Dr Cotgreave: We have argued for a long time for a ministry of science that dealt with this kind of issue. I think now that the OSI is considerably more than half of the DTI's budget we are moving towards a ministry of science in all but name and I think that not research councils but that organisation is better placed to commission research than some of the departments that do not have a scientific culture. Dr Turner: That is very helpful. Q973 Bob Spink: We are with you on that. You can talk about horizon scanning now. We would like to ask you about the management of scientific uncertainty, and of course that is a function of probability and outcome and consequences and outcome and all of that. Do you think the policy makers handle scientific uncertainty well? Dr Cotgreave: I do not think I want to answer that. I think Martin would be better placed to answer it. Q974 Bob Spink: I mean policies mainly on climate change or on bird flu. Professor Taylor: Exactly. I was going to come in at the level of specifics first and then perhaps move to the general afterwards. I have in front of me three specifics that leap to my eye: climate change, where, as you say, there is scientific evidence but it is far from definitive as yet, but such is the huge, possibly irreversible, risk to the planet that action should indeed be taken, so I believe the Government has acted well on this. Q975 Bob Spink: I think, Martin, that someone said that it is becoming more definitive as the hours tick by. Professor Taylor: I would not doubt that. I am trying to be generous. I am a complete advocate of trying to do what we can. I have already spoken to nano-technology where there was uncertainty. The other one that I remember, because we recently have done some work with the Food Standards Agency, is the way things were done for the BSE 30 month rule when initially it was quite a knowledge vacuum, just as Des was saying. That is another one I could have picked on. The risks were very serious and robust measures had to be taken while more research was done and then they were able to re-evaluate what was to be done. The ones I am giving you, I am afraid, are the three successes, so I am afraid I have not got a great criticism. Can I just come down to the lower level of data, the horizon scanning? I am always a little bit worried when there is a lack of knowledge, a lack of scientific evidence. This might just be cause for inaction; you will see that in our submission. One way to try and get round that is to try and spot the issues well in advance and commission or garner whatever research is out there. The Royal Society has its own horizon scanning. From what I can gather most of the departments have it, certainly Defra has, and of course there is the OSI that runs something sometimes called the scan of scans, so there is a lot of it out there but I do not honestly believe it is terribly well joined up and that is why I tried to bring it in at your earlier question when I thought it could be joined up a little better. Q976 Bob Spink: How do you spot issues on the horizon scanning scale across Europe? For instance, are you looking at what is happening in Europe? Professor Taylor: At least half of our scanning is done through the cutting edge scientists that we are in contact with. We are constantly asking what is coming up. Q977 Bob Spink: So would you be looking at things that are happening in Europe, like, the REACH Directive or the Physical Agents Directive and horizon scanning and saying, "Where is this going to lead us?", and if so, how did we end up not spotting the MRI problems with the Physical Agents Directive? Dr Pike: Certainly on the chemistry side there are various organisations like SusChem which is looking at sustainable chemistry in Europe. That is looking at those sorts of issues, what is going to happen in the more distant future. There are these collaborative bodies that are doing that. If I could just go back to the thrust of your earlier questioning and be very specific, when it comes to the future and where things may be going there are two very important examples I would like to bring out. One refers to definitions, which may sound rather dry, and the other refers to process. Definitions is to do with the oil industry and the specific example I think I will give you, and I have mentioned it to the Chairman before, is that people talk about proven reserves, but how many people really understand what that means? Proven reserves of oil strictly mean that volume which has a 90 per cent chance of being exceeded. Very few people understand that and then when they see the proven reserves of country X and country Y and country Z they just add them up arithmetically and that is completely wrong. They have to be added up probabilistically. What you have is that the whole industry is looking at the way energy is going, but even the most basic definitions, even the most basic numbers, are incorrect. We probably have twice as much oil and gas available as most people in the street and in fact most environmental analysts think. The individual companies understand the picture but very few people look at the global picture. The message there is that in looking over the horizon we have to get things right as basic as definitions and numbers and we are not doing that. The other example is one of process. You will have seen a lot of debate about green chemistry and green fuels. Again, what few people really understand is that to produce this hydrogen or this bio fuel, to produce this GTL diesel, at the producing country you have to stick vast amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. Looking at the well-to-wheel process, in other words, the whole process, it is certainly not green chemistry at all. It is something completely different. People are making judgments and even research decisions by looking at a very small part of the overall process. In looking over the horizon we need to consider what is the whole process from A to B before we invest in that or do further research. Chairman: I will stop you there because we are running out of time. Can I come on to Dr Harris. Dr Harris: Before I ask you about the precautionary principle, there is just this outstanding issue of the role of government in commissioning research. In the Independent on Sunday two weeks ago the Government announced we wanted to have more home births and the Health Secretary said that she was going to commission research "to support that policy". Do you see that as a common problem in terms of politicians, not just government, in fairness? How do we deal with that problem of commissioning the research to support a decision? Q978 Chairman: Can I ask you to be very brief in answering these questions. Professor Taylor: I think this is a case inter alia of trying to get the terms of reference for your research right. It is skewed in the way that you put it. Similarly, it is very important to get the membership right. Q979 Dr Harris: I did not put it like that; she put it like that. Professor Taylor: I understood that. But when you said it a little snigger went round the room because the term of reference is clearly wrong. I think there is a role for the learned societies and external scientists to help form the terms of reference when studies are made and also to check that the membership has the right capacity to it. Q980 Dr Harris: I want to ask you about the precautionary principle because your evidence, as the Royal Society evidence talked about the precautionary principle having several conflicting definitions, but then in your evidence you talk about the precautionary principle, not a precautionary principle. Should it be flexible and undefined and vague or should it be more defined and therefore less flexible? Professor Taylor: All I can say is that when we speak to the precautionary principle I think we are speaking of the generic one, as I think has been discussed in this room, where there is a paucity of scientific evidence and what do you do, how do you handle that. There are formal definitions apparently in the document by POST and that is where the plurality comes from. I think it would be good if we could all fix on one definition. Q981 Dr Harris: Do you think the Government has done that across departments? Professor Taylor: I am not aware of that. That would be helpful. Q982 Dr Harris: They talk about a precautionary approach and define that. Professor Taylor: Maybe that is a thing we could take up with Dave King to try and clarify what is meant by fixing the precautionary principle. Q983 Chairman: I think if the Royal Society could do that and actually define the precautionary principle you would do mankind a huge favour, and particularly Dr Harris. Professor Taylor: I am not sure if that is a joke or homework! Chairman: Both. Q984 Dr Harris: The Royal Society point out that the misapplication of the precautionary principle can cause real harm. I think it was the Royal Society of Chemistry that gave two examples, one of which was the precautionary approach taken with regard to DDT which it is said, and there is good evidence, caused millions of deaths from malaria without any good evidence of benefit, and other examples as well. What do you think the way forward is on the precautionary principle? Dr Pike: The way forward is obviously to think through the policies or the decisions one makes. In other words, with DDT there was obviously a short-term benefit and there are other examples where there are short-term benefits but other things come into play. One has to think through what those are before you actually make decisions. Chairman: Margaret? Q985 Margaret Moran: We have touched during this session on the role of the media in terms of shaping public perception, but can you just tell me what you think is the primary role of public engagement? Is it to shape their opinions, is it inform the public or is it to receive concerns back from the public? How can we manage the expectations of the people we are consulting so that we get the best scientific outcomes? Dr Cotgreave: I think the answer is probably all three of those things. I think you need to shape public opinion, you have got to lead, but you have also got to take public opinion into account, hear what it is, and if you want to shape public opinion and know what it is, you have got to inform people of the basis behind the things that you are doing. I think it is probably all three of those things. Sorry, what was the second part of the question? Q986 Margaret Moran: How do we manage the expectations of the people being consulted? Dr Cotgreave: I think you have to be a lot more honest with people than we have been in the past. BSE is a classic example of this where Ministers went round saying, "Beef is perfectly safe," and John Gummer gave his daughter that beef burger that she did not want to eat. That is not a party political point. I think ministers of any persuasion would have done that at that time. Nobody really believed him and believed the Government and they were right because in fact the Government was misrepresenting the level of uncertainty that the scientists had given them. The Scientific Committee had said that there was a remote risk that this could be dangerous. Nevertheless, the Government went round saying it was perfectly safe. So I think you have got to be much more honest with people. My reading of the way things are done these days is, for example, on bird flu you see Dave King on the news, on the telly or in the paper much more often than you ever used to see Bill Stewart in the days of BSE. You see the scientists and you know "this is someone whom I can trust. This is not a party politician trying to sell me a beef burger; this is someone being honest with me and hedging their comments around a little bit of uncertainty." You cannot manage expectations by telling people it is perfectly safe when everybody knows that nothing is perfectly safe. Dr Wallace: We would agree that one of the main objectives of communicating with the public is to be honest about uncertainty and stop that turning into panic. The MMR issue rumbled on was because it was not addressed properly. An example of when it was done well was in the 2001 foot and mouth outbreak with the concern that burning carcasses on pyres would affect the amount of dioxins in milk. John Krebs immediately appeared in the media, explained what the risk assessment was, what the proposed monitoring programme was and suggested that people consumed milk from not within a two kilometre radius of the pyres, and panic did not arise. Chairman: I am very sorry but we have to come to the end of this session. Can I thank you all enormously for your contributions and forgive us for the shortness of our time with you. We very much appreciate not only your contributions but also the written evidence which you constantly give to us. Professor Taylor, if you can resolve the issue of the precautionary principle you will do mankind a great favour. Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Professor Tim Hope, Professor of Criminology, Keele University; Mr Norman Glass, Chief Executive, National Centre for Social Research; and Mr William Solesbury, Senior Research Fellow, ESRC Centre for Evidence-Based Policy and Practice, gave evidence.
Chairman: Good morning to our second panel. Professor Tim Hope, Professor of Criminology at the University of Keele; Norman Glass, the Chief Executive of the National Centre for Social Research; and William Solesbury, the Senior Research Fellow at ESRC and the Centre for Evidence-Based Policy and Practice. This is a panel that should have all the answers and I am sure you were fascinated by the comments that were made earlier. I am going to ask my colleague Brian Iddon if he will begin on this session. Q987 Dr Iddon: There are those who say that evidence-based policy-making, which the Government is creating a fuss about at the moment as you well know, is incompatible with the realities of the electoral cycle. I know Tim Hope has had something to say about that in the past. Do you agree with the statement that they are incompatible or is there some compatibility feasible? Professor Hope: I do not think anyone would demur from the general expectation or hope that politics and policy could be informed by rational debate and rational information. I think the close coupling of politics on the one hand and science on the other, or the utilisation of knowledge on the one hand and the production of knowledge on the other, which has occurred during the development of the idea of evidence-based policy-making, raises certain questions and concerns about protecting and safeguarding both the quality of knowledge production and the quality of knowledge utilisation. So my concerns and my worries are about the close coupling of these two activities, largely because, to address your point, both of course are legitimate activities and have their own forms of public accounting, if I could put it like that, politics through the political process and science through the scientific process, through the process of peer review and so on. I think when one couples them together the, if I might put it, power and influence of politics tends to infect the procedures and processes of knowledge production of science, to its detriment, and I think to the detriment of the public interest. Q988 Bob Spink: Could I just interject. Are you really saying that sometimes the Government are selective about what evidence they choose and what evidence they use? Professor Hope: Yes. Q989 Chairman: Or does not use it at all? Professor Hope: Or does not use it at all. The process of selecting evidence is a common one for both politics and for science itself. The discipline of science, the practice of science is all about selection, so it is not that government is any more or less selective than science is selective in terms of how it produces knowledge, but that there are different principles involved. Q990 Dr Iddon: Norman Glass, you have had difficulties with this concept of marrying the two together, have you not? Mr Glass: Yes. Maybe I just have a sunny disposition but it does not really bother me as a big issue that there is a difference between the facts. In social research facts are always questions of probability as well. I do defer a bit to our physical and biological scientists. I wish I had the chance to do experiments in the way they do experiments. The facts that we gather tend to be more fungible. You believe them through the weight, the repetition, the quantity of things happening much the same way rather than any particular piece of fact that emerges at a particular time. Then the fact is that politicians like the rest of us, find some sorts of facts easier to accept than others when they tend to confirm strongly held beliefs that they have acquired through lots of other ways of acquiring beliefs. So I just tend to think that is life. You produce facts in as rigorous a way as you can and you hand them to people with proper explanations of what you think they mean, but politicians have to make decisions on the basis of a lot of things - past commitments, their own innate prejudices, the views of their colleagues, what they think the public will bear. I think you do a very difficult job and I do not envy you. I do not find this kind of contrast between hard science, which shows things, and then what we do, which is always played around with by politicians, terribly difficult to live with. In the end - and this is what keeps me going - if the facts continue to point in the same way people will change their opinions. It may take a while but it will happen in the end. There is only so long you can go on believing the impossible. It wears you down after a while. Q991 Dr Iddon: In our case it is proportional to our majorities. William Solesbury? Mr Solesbury: I think part of the problem arises from the term "evidence based". It is also a term that is in the title of the Centre where I work but it was given to us by the ESRC when we were funded initially. I think the concept that policy should be based on evidence is something that I would rail against quite fiercely. It implies first of all that it is the sole thing that you should consider. Secondly, it implies the metaphor 'base' and implies a kind of solidity, which I agree with Norman is often not there, certainly in the social sciences although I think to a great degree, bearing in mind the earlier discussion on probability, not always in the natural and biological sciences. If we have a concept of evidence being able to inform policy, that is something that we can all feel much more comfortable about because in that context evidence is not the only thing that informs policy. I do not need to lecture you on the nature of politics. I referred in the memorandum to conceptualisation of the four Is which is policy shaped by information, interests, ideologies and institutions. Certainly in the training and consultancy work that I have done with government departments, I have always found that a very fruitful way of getting them to think about a particular contribution that evidence and information can make and how it can be weighed against other things. I think the problem is also not just in the terms. The Patricia Hewitt example in the previous session is a nice example of the curious way in which politicians and the civil servants who advise them are rather bad at saying we have reached a decision by weighing these things up and have chosen, because of the nature of the evidence, to give less weight to that and more weight to these other considerations. There is a curious desire on the part of politicians and perhaps ministers in particular to have the evidence very firmly on their side. That leads I think to these rather perverse statements like the one that was quoted of Patricia Hewitt that she wanted to have the research that demonstrated it was a good thing to have home births. There are all sorts of other reasons surely why home births would be a good concept without necessarily having to be demonstrated to be scientifically more likely to produce safe babies or reduce mortality. Mr Glass: Can I come in on that just to follow up on the point about Patricia Hewitt. I do not know the context in which Patricia Hewitt made her statement, but you can imagine a context in which it would not be absurd or anti-scientific or something like that. For example, if you decided on the basis of evidence or prejudice, or whatever it might be, that you were going to have a policy of encouraging home births, and there has been a lot of stuff for ages about whether mothers prefer home births even if it is slightly riskier (because we do not all try to absolutely minimise risk) so if you have decided on the basis of this kind of evidence that home births were a policy that you were going to promote or encourage or support, then it might be sensible to say, "And we want evidence that will support this policy in the sense if we are going to have this policy we may need to know how best to implement it, how it should be delivered, what kinds of ways of delivering it are less risky than others." I am not defending Patricia Hewitt. I do not know the context in which she made that statement. I only saw what was in the papers and a long history as a civil servant told me not to believe what is in the papers. So I would be careful about saying that what she said was anti-scientific or contrary to the notion that evidence should inform policy. It may be that what she said was indeed that and of course it may have been an inopportune thing to say. I have worked with Patricia Hewitt in the past and I do not think she is the kind of person who just rules out evidence on the basis of her subjective prejudices. Q992 Chairman: I want to come on to you Professor Hope. You have been extremely critical of the way in which the Home Office has used your research and the way it has misinterpreted your research and presented it as evidence to support policy. What evidence do you have that this is a systemic problem within the system or is it just a one-off? Professor Hope: I have no other contemporary evidence other than my own experience of observing the behaviour, as it were, of the Home Office in this regard, although I did serve as a research officer in the Home Office from 1974 to 1991, so I have my recollections to draw upon in that regard. There are two things I would want to say about my criticism. First of all, the criticisms I have levelled against the Home Office have been in the context of a scientific discourse or a scientific set of criticisms. The circumstances that arose in this case were, in simple form, the Home Office researchers acquired data that we had already analysed on the contract to the Home Office in connection with evaluating the Reducing Burglary Initiative. The Home Office acquired the public data that we had used (that is the crime figures) and re-analysed those figures and produced a set of findings on the basis of their analysis in an official Home Office publication, Findings 204. I had pointed out prior to the Home Office publishing this that I thought their interpretation differed from our own and I had identified where I thought the difference lay in terms of our respective scientific methodologies and the bases on which we had produced our work and the bases on which the Home Office had produced their findings. Despite that, they proceeded to publish their own analysis. The inferences from that analysis were, let us say, rather more congenial and favourable to the political interests in this programme than were my own. I have set that out more fully in an academic paper published in the journal Criminology and Criminal Justice which I have provided to your Clerk. Q993 Chairman: We have got that. My question to you is do you feel that that is systemic within the system or was that just a one-off where it was desired to have a political result? Professor Hope: I would like to believe that it was a one-off but I have no specific evidence except I suppose hearsay and certainly understandings I have from colleagues within the British Society of Criminology, our professional body. At the British Society of Criminology conference in the University of Bangor in July 2003 there were a number of papers to be given by academics on the basis of contracted work that they were involved in, as I was, for the Home Office. A number of the researchers were advised not to present their papers at the last minute even though they had been advertised in the programme by Home Office officials. Q994 Chairman: By the Home Office itself? Professor Hope: Yes, so that would suggest to me certainly there was at that time or in those circumstances something rather more systemic about the desire to control the release of information and analysis, certainly about the Crime Reduction Programme. Q995 Chairman: Norman, I know you were heavily involved with the Sure Start programme. We had frequent statements by ministers that this was an evidential programme, the evidence had come from the United States where they had got very significant achievements through the programme there, but you claimed that there was no evidence or there was little evidence. The question I ask you is: does it matter if it was a good programme? Mr Glass: I am not sure I could have said that since I was the one who assembled the evidence so there may be a misunderstanding here. I pick up on William's point which is "evidence influenced". Like him, I do not like the phrase "evidence based" it is not the way policy gets made. In the case of the Sure Start programme what we did was we followed a fairly open process. We were influenced very heavily by a series of experimental studies in the United States, many of them different but relating to early years programmes, which appeared to show significant improvements on a number of measures. That is the United States, they are experimental programmes, and you cannot just take them over and apply them here. We were influenced by issues of evidence from our own birth cohort studies which showed that many of the influences in people's later lives were present in the first seven years of their lives and that those were the most significant influences affecting people's lives, in so far as you could see what affected people's lives. There was a lot of evidence on the importance of things like parental attachment and so on. There was a lot of stuff around of that kind which did not point to particular programmes but nevertheless pointed in the direction of saying that early years mattered and probably mattered more than interventions you could make later on in people's lives and that there were things that appeared to be effective which were being carried out elsewhere. That is where you get to the point of saying, "Well, at that point, do I let go of the billiard cue and actually hit the ball or do I wait around for more evidence to come in and try and do it?" I think our view at that stage was that there was sufficient evidence, if you like, adjacent to the issue of whether an early years programme could be successful which was convincing to think that we ought to have some sort of early years programme which we did not previously have. I am sorry if I have been reported as saying I did not think the evidence was there because. In Sure Start, because of the way we did the process, we had three public seminars to which we invited academics, we had ministers present at some of these seminars, we had a literature review of what was known about early years which we commissioned from the Thomas Coram Research Unit and so on. In that particular programme there was more of what I would call evidence around than there had been for some other programmes with which I am afraid I have been associated in the past. In that case I think there was a lot of evidence but what there was not - and that gets back to our social sciences - was experimental evidence of randomly allocating people to a programme and not to a programme and then seeing what happens. We have very little of that in this country. There is quite a bit of it in the United States. We tend to have the policies; they tend to have the evidence. It is a rather interesting mix. For various reasons, and it is a point I would try and make to the Committee, ministers and governments in this country, both Conservative and Labour (there is no difference) have been very reluctant to allow social scientists to carry out experimental programmes where people, with their consent of course, are allocated at random to a programme and then to a control group. We have done very little of that. That would be much stronger evidence. It is still not clinching but it would be much stronger evidence. Q996 Chairman: Just before I bring Robert in here, could I have a very yes or no answer really. I can understand a policy being based on a fairly small body of evidence in the case of Sure Start but rolling it out on the scale at which Sure Start was rolled out without in fact --- Mr Glass: Now you are coming more to my point. Q997 Chairman: --- without continuing to monitor and gain the evidence and then say is this worth the investment that we are making, would you saying that is an issue? Mr Glass: I certainly believe and I argued strongly at the time that there was sufficient evidence to have a small Sure Start programme. I think we started off with a programme of 200 which is not that small but was still small. My view - and I argued it at the time when I was in the Civil Service and I have argued it subsequently - was that we should have learned much more about the experience from those 200 before we rolled it out on any scale. I do feel that we have rolled it out on the basis of inadequate evidence about how best it should be done as much as whether it has an effect, and being clear about the kinds of impact we wanted this programme to have. If that is what you are saying I said, then I agree with that. We rolled it out too much, too fast and too inadequately reviewed. Q998 Chairman: That is what I understand you to be saying. Mr Glass: I am sorry I misunderstood before. Chairman: Robert? Q999 Mr Flello: Before I get into my question I just wanted to pick up on the point about the social science experiments. To what extent do you feel those are hampered by ethics committees, for example, saying "You cannot go off and do that. You have to stop people having that experience because it would be better if they did not have it?" Mr Glass: What you have just said is very close to my heart. We are increasingly running into this issue where ethics committees, which are largely of medical origin, are applying the same sorts of criteria to social research that they apply to medical research. We have an ethics process in our own organisation. I think most academic researchers are subject to them. The problem is that in this case I think that we are being subject to a level of ethical scrutiny which is appropriate to a process where people may live or die but is not appropriate to a process about whether they will get £10 a week or £5 a week. These ethical committees consist, I have to say - and I am conscious that Dr Harris and for all I know many others are medical practitioners around here - of medical practitioners, many of whom have very little familiarity with social science or the methods of social science and tend to bring with them the concerns (quite rightly, that is what they are on those ethics committees for) of their experience in the medical sciences. We usually get the through the ethics committee with no great difficulty but it is very time-consuming and it does, I think, hinder many of the kinds of experiments that I would like to see happening. We have had two major policy experiments in recent years, the first ever on a major scale, both of them to do with people with long-term sickness and disability, and I think both of them have been very, very rigorously carried out. Ministers agreed to them in the end but it took a long time to get ministers to agree to them and it certainly presented very serious operational difficulties and therefore cost to put it through the conventional ethical procedure. Q1000 Mr Flello: Professor Hope, you looked as though you were perhaps disagreeing with some of those comments. Professor Hope: I just wanted to raise a question over the assumption that the experiment in the form of a random control trial is necessarily a gold standard of deriving evidence. That is in a sense irrespective of arguments about the ethics or practicality of experimenting in the social world with human subjects. There is a considerable body of opinion within the scientific community, within the social scientific community, across the disciplines, and some considerable discussion about whether, if I can put it like this, the RCT does what it says it does on the tin. This I think is part of my general point which is that it would be perhaps as foolish to move simply to a rather slavish adoption of a gold standard of the social experiment as though that somehow resolved issues of policy, resolved issues of practicality, resolved issues of choice, resolved issues of evidence and reliability which seems to make a fetish out of a sort of scientism that is perhaps inappropriate. Q1001 Mr Flello: I am conscious I still have not got to my questions. I should say I come at this with a slightly vested interest in that previously I ran a children's charity that worked in the area of intervention with young people with emotional and behavioural problems where we found that getting in early was much more effective than later, and we were constrained by the clinical psychologist who was working with us having ethics committees. Mr Glass: I do not disagree with Tim. I have been advocating these things for 30 years since I was a researcher in the University of Newcastle. I think two in 30 years does not count as an overwhelming monolithic method. I would even settle for four. If we had four I would think I was doing well. Q1002 Mr Flello: I shall move on to the main thrust of my questions. We have had evidence from the Campaign for Science and Engineering that said it is only possible for the Government to handle risk and science appropriately if it has a sufficiently expert and critical in-house capability to allow them to ask the right questions. Do you believe that the Government has sufficient in-house expertise of science to be that intelligent customer of scientific advice and research? Mr Solesbury: I would make a distinction in terms of in-house capability between scientific staff, which of course have increased vastly in numbers and the budgets which they command to commission work, and the traditional Civil Service policy-making people. I think the problem in terms of being intelligent as a customer is very much on the side of the latter in the sense that I do not think there is, as yet, very much, or at least not a very sophisticated understanding of the occasions when evidence is useful, the sort of evidence to be obtained, how to evaluate evidence when it is available, how to interpret it, and how to weigh it. In that respect, I think it is worth drawing attention to a current exercise led by the Cabinet Office called the Professional Skills for Government initiative which has been redefining the competence frameworks for civil servants at all levels. One of the interesting aspects of that is that there are four core areas of competence which are being defined at all grades. One of the core competences that all civil servants are meant to have is the capability for the analysis and use of evidence. If you look at the framework it says what this means for a permanent secretary, what this means for an under-secretary, what this means for a principal. I am sorry I am using rather old-fashioned terms for the various levels. At the bottom level clearly people are meant to be able to understand and interpret evidence. At the high level people are meant to know when one should be looking for evidence and where to look for it. That is quite promising. Whether in fact that is actually finding its way through into the training and, more importantly, the reward systems in the Civil Service, a more sophisticated understanding of when that evidence should be sought and how it should be used, I really cannot judge. It seems to me that recognising analysis and use of evidence as one of the core skills of servant servants is a positive step and it might produce some benefits in time. Q1003 Dr Turner: What you are describing is a sort of generalist competence. What about specific expertise within departments which is relevant to those departments? Do you have meaningful ways of measuring that level of expertise to decide whether it is adequate? If not, what do you do about it? Mr Glass: I used to manage at one stage the social researchers in the Department of Social Security and subsequently a body of social researchers in the Department of the Environment, as it then was, on the housing programme. My appreciation then was that these people were on the whole well trained to make judgments about what was good social science, and what was value for money in terms of what the Government was buying. The issue was rather more the question of their influence on the people that Bill was referring to. The old Civil Service phrase about "on tap, not on top" that eggheads/boffins should be on tap, not on top, is still very much alive and well in that context. In many cases it was perfectly fine but the difficulty in some cases of arguing with policy customers about the consequences of bias in evidence, which is what we social scientists are essentially hunting down day after day, for many policy people this seemed a kind of geeky interest. I remember in the Treasury the geekier economists were referred to as "v-necks". These were people who came into work in v-neck sweaters and obviously were not entirely reliable! There is still evidence of thinking of course these are people who are interested in that sort of thing but it does not matter in the practical world, but of course it does. It is absolutely crucial. If you are basing your evidence on unrepresentative, biased samples then you cannot believe a word. In fact, it is worse than knowing nothing. Knowing things that are not so is worse than knowing nothing at all. The difficulty is not so much in the capacity of the people that Bill refers to, and there are a lot of social scientists (although I think they are given less and less capacity to influence), it is the business of having a lot of people who are in the driving seat who think they know things they do not actually know and whose manifest confidence about their own ability you have no doubt experienced in other evidence sessions. Q1004 Chairman: We could not possibly comment! You can; we cannot. Tim? Professor Hope: As I said, I served in what was once called the Home Office Research and Planning Unit. It was not a directorate. I was certainly proud to be a geek or a v-neck and I may even have worn denim at some point during my career. Q1005 Chairman: Could I just say one of the members of the public has a v-neck and I would not want him to feel --- Mr Glass: I very rarely wore a tie. I think it is part of the point I am trying to make which is this distance in itself was a protection for the researchers, as Norman has identified, and in some ways a protection for the politician and the policy-maker too. What I think has happened within government, certainly within the Home Office at least, as I infer it, is that the institutional position of government researchers, paradoxically, has become, as research and knowledge has become more important, weakened as professional civil servants or as experts. I think this renders them vulnerable. It renders them very vulnerable to pressures both from the political process - greater temptation to interfere and to know about and to steer the production of knowledge - and it also, I think, renders them very vulnerable to outside pressures from scientists and scientific groups who wish to influence the direction of official research. I could describe where I think these institutional weaknesses have developed. They have certainly developed from around the early 1980s onwards. Amongst them, one of the transformations I experienced myself was a far greater direct interest amongst ministers in both what research was commissioned and what its findings were to be prior to their publication. I suppose a general diminution of the Rothschild Principle that Norman was talking about which during the 1970s had governed the arrangements. I also think there have been some unintended consequences, paradoxically, of competitive tendering and procurement. The old arrangement was essentially a grant arrangement with outside academics, and the boffins in the backroom also conducted their own research. I do not think they were particularly less transparent in the conduct of these but the product of that was that I believe it created much greater partnership between the researchers, the scientists outside government, the policy customers, the administrators, in terms of a buy-in to the research process as it was going through prior to publication. I think the downside of competitive tendering and procurement - and of course I do not want to decry the public probity arguments about procurement - is that it creates a greater distance. It creates the researchers as contractors rather than co-producers of evidence that is useful. Chairman: I will just have to stop you there because I am desperately trying to get as much as I can in and I have only got seven minutes left. Q1006 Dr Turner: You are outlining something of a cultural problem in departments which clearly has political connotations. It leads in quite nicely to me asking you how do you see the key drivers in departments for seeking the so-called "evidence base" for policy determination? How do you see them? Where is it coming from? Professor Hope: I think the experiences that I have had, other people have had and the evidence you may have before you, suggest to me, at any rate, that we ought not to perhaps look to Government departments to solve their own problems. I am not particularly sanguine that we can correct some of these difficulties that have arisen. What has happened, if I can put it like this, is a too close coupling of the research production and the knowledge utilisation function, which I think is rightly where experts and civil servants should be retained in-house; how do we use this information, how does it go into policy, and so on? The close coupling of utilisation with knowledge production leads to difficulties. What I would want to suggest is that we decouple these two functions, and that knowledge production is placed at rather more arm's length from Government departments. Perhaps an independent institute, a public institute, that would be able to take a strategic line from ministers and departments as to what kind of knowledge they would like, but then to manage independently the process of producing relevant knowledge for that process. Q1007 Dr Harris: A slightly different approach has been suggested, perhaps in your evidence, which is to have a central commissioning pot of money which departments have to bid for and is peer reviewed effectively. They have to compete for the right to do this research on the basis of the benefit that the research will give and effectively the outline design of the project. That would be another way of ensuring that only the best research was done and there was another layer of looking at it at the outset before the protocol was finalised or as the protocol was finalised. Professor Hope: I think that is part of the same argument. Simply, I suppose that is making government research conform more to standards of scientific knowledge. Q1008 Dr Harris: If it is an arm's length commissioning process you do not have to have the work done by an institute, it just needs to be commissioned in a more scientific way. Professor Hope: That is absolutely right. There is a range of knowledge producers available, both within universities and elsewhere and as there once was within government departments themselves. Q1009 Dr Harris: What do think of the suggestion, Messrs Glass and Solesbury? Mr Glass: I am sorry, I take a less pessimistic view than Tim does. I have never worked closely with the Home Office. Q1010 Dr Harris: What do you think of the suggestion though? Mr Glass: I think there is something, it is called the ESRC. It seems to me that if you want to do independent research of that kind, then you make proposals that are peer reviewed by the ESRC and that is fine. I think there is also a need for government research, and that Government needs to answer particular questions which it is concerned with. As long as you know that is what the thing is for, then, it seems to me, you can put up safeguards to make sure that it is publicly available, that people get a chance to look at it and so on. I think the last thing we should do, which would be a very bad idea, which would be to give ministers the impression that research is something they need to be afraid of. I think something that says, "We have got to take this out and anaesthetise it and make sure that it is absolutely this, that and the other pure and independent", would encourage the notion that research is something that the opposition is interested in and not something we ministers should be interested in. I think that would be a very big danger. Q1011 Dr Turner: Can I ask you how you feel about the role of chief scientific advisers? Not every department has one, notably the Treasury does not have one yet it has been suggested to us that the Treasury is very influential in driving this process. The other problem is of cross-departmental collaboration or the myth of joined-up government. How well do you think the Government handles this? Mr Solesbury: I will just answer in relation to chief scientific advisers. There are two observations: firstly, I agree with you that not all departments have them. I think the tendency is for the role to be associated fairly exclusively, in practice if not always in principle in terms of a job definition, with natural science and medical science and so on, you will find that organisationally in many departments where there are social scientists, and beyond that there are economists and statisticians and so on, they are not part of that sort of system. I would suggest that the question needs reformulating as to whether in each department you need a person at a very senior level who has lead responsibility for evidence in the broader sense. It is far, far wider than the relatively narrow remit that is attached to people who have the title of chief scientific adviser. Mr Glass: I would agree with that, and I have worked in a number of departments. I think the notion that the Department for Work and Pensions needs a chief scientific adviser in the traditional sense is nonsense. I have to say, many physical scientists are extremely ignorant about social science methods, very hostile to them, prejudiced against them and believe they do not tell you anything because they are not based on a particular view of scientific method which I think is applicable in some cases but is not always applicable. Rigour, yes, but a particular view of scientific methods - I think Tim would agree with me here - RCTs as the only way of getting answers, I absolutely agree with him, they are not the only way of getting answers, it is a useful way. Scientists in that tradition would be harmful in many cases. Chairman: I am anxious to bring in my colleague, Mr Newmark, who has come straight from the Treasury to here. Q1012 Mr Newmark: Grilling somebody who wants to be on the MPC. My first question is to do with Norman. In 2004 you said: "Systematic evaluation of policies, even where it exists and the Treasury itself as is a notable non-practitioner, remains, in many cases, a procedure for bayoneting the dead". Can you give me an example of what you mean by that? Mr Glass: I think it is right that the Treasury is a notable absentee. They introduce all sorts of policies, tax policies, which never get evaluated because they do not have the process. Q1013 Mr Newmark: Is the Chancellor a v-neck in your view then? Mr Glass: I never saw him in a v-neck! I think the issue there is in many cases the cycle of scientific evaluation and the political cycle do not match. I know of endless cases where we set up pilots and by the time the pilot was ready the policy was already being rolled out across the country. Unfortunately, the only solution for that is for the social science community and for social scientists within Government to think ahead. We are going to have an issue about probation policy, it is not going to go away. Can we please ensure that by the next time we get to this issue we will have some evidence available that will be relevant. It may not solve the problem tomorrow that we have got, but in two or three years' time if you plant the acorns the oaks will be there. We have just got to take that long view. It comes back to your point about cross-departmental collaboration. That makes it even more difficult because departments do not - it is amazing - even compare their research programmes with one another to see whether there is overlap and whether they could do things synergistically. Getting people to work together is a problem in all these cases. Everyone signs up to it, but nobody does it for all sorts of reasons. Q1014 Mr Newmark: William, in your view, is the Government using pilots appropriately? Are there too many or too few? Mr Solesbury: I think there are probably too few and they are used inappropriately for the reasons that Norman alludes to. It is a good example of the mismatch between the research timetable and cycle and the political cycle, that once pilots are up and running ministers are very often keen to roll them out before results are ready. Q1015 Mr Newmark: In your view, how can they be protected from political pressure? Mr Solesbury: In a sense I come back to the point I made before. Maybe it is a false expectation, but if there was a rather more sophisticated attitude amongst senior officials and amongst ministers themselves to evidence and the willingness to see it as a resource to be drawn on as and when, but not necessarily to determine things, then they would perhaps be prepared to say, "In this case the evidence is so crucial to the decision - given, let us say for argument's sake, the cost and the commitment involved - we will wait until we have the evidence in before we take the decision to extend the programme on the basis of the pilots". Mr Glass: I think you have to work with the grain and use the pilots. It is like that old Two Ronnies' question where you are always answering the question that went before, that sort of sketch. I think here too you need to use the pilots to answer next time's problem, unfortunately not this time's problem. It is no use appealing to ministers not to be active and introduce policies where they think, "We can do it but it will not have any effect", but as long as you design them in such a way that they are available for answering questions the next time round, that may be the best you can hope for. Q1016 Dr Harris: Professor Hope, how is what happened to your research in the Home Office different from some aspects of fraud in the scientific technique to misread despite warnings and misrepresent findings? Do they have things in common, yes or no? Professor Hope: Yes and no. Q1017 Dr Harris: Let me help you move on. If peer review publication was required, would that have stopped what happened happening? Professor Hope: I think it is rather like the effect of law. We know publicly what fraud is, we know roughly what the offence is and we know that if detected we will be tried and, if found guilty, punished. I would agree with you in the sense that if these procedures are akin to what fraud is as a crime, then we need to create some kind of institutional arrangement. Q1018 Dr Harris: Scientific fraud, publication fraud, that sort of thing? Professor Hope: Yes. The protection against that for society and the public interest, flawed though it might be, are the procedures that science has evolved itself through publication, peer review and so on. Those are the best we have. Q1019 Dr Harris: My final question is on this whole evidence-base. I asked Ian Diamond of the ESRC, whether he thought there was a role for the ESRC to monitor whether the Government was doing evidence-based policy-making when it said it was and he said, "Yes, he had the centre to do it", as you know. Then the chief scientific officer said, "No, that is his job". David King said, "I do that. I am independent. I go around doing this". I argue, but what do you think? Do you think there is a role for a discrete project to check claims of evidence-led policy-making which is really separate and is ESRC led? Mr Solesbury: That was not the purpose for which the Centre was set up, of which I am a visiting fellow. I would set that aside as the case that he argued. There might be a case for something that might be akin to the National Audit Office, which has a position of great authority and, usually retrospectively, passes judgments of this kind. I would offer you that as a thought. Chairman: With that thought, we have come to the end of this session. Professor Tim Hope, Norman Glass and William Solesbury, thank you very, very much for your evidence. I am sorry we cantered through at a pace but such is the nature of the Select Committee. Thank you very much indeed, and thank you to the Committee. Apologies to the v-neck! |