Examination of Witnesses (Questions 100
- 119)
WEDNESDAY 25 FEBRUARY 2009
DR TIM
BRADSHAW, PROFESSOR
DAME JANET
FINCH, BARONESS
O'NEILL OF
BENGARVE AND
MS JUDY
BRITTON
Q100 Dr Harris: In your evidence
you say that you most recently met Prime Minister Gordon Brown
in December 2008.
Professor Dame Janet Finch: That
was the first time we met him.
Q101 Dr Harris: That was not only
the most recent, it was the only time.
Professor Dame Janet Finch: That
is true, yes.
Q102 Dr Harris: I am not sure that
that is entirely clear from reading that; it looks as if it was
the most recent of several.
Professor Dame Janet Finch: We
met the previous prime minister before that.
Q103 Dr Harris: I got the impression
from one of your earlier answers that you do not think that what
we were discussing with the first panel—the Drayson initiative—is
a significant change of policy. We think that the Government has
announced a change in policy and is having a debate about how
to influence it. Do you agree that this is a relatively recent
change in policy; this is the idea of picking strategic areas
to publicly fund.
Professor Dame Janet Finch: There
has been a speech by Lord Drayson and another one by John Denham
and we are very interested in exploring the consequences of those.
There has not been, as I think somebody did say in the previous
session, a set of formal policy announcements about how this is
going to happen so I think we see this as something that is a
discussion which is continuing and to which we would wish to contribute.
Q104 Dr Harris: I find it curious
that there has not been a Green Paper or a White Paper when I
think they are quite clear that this is what they are going to
do. I am surprised that they have announced this proposed change
of direction without the CST having been asked for its opinion
in advance. You say you are going to discuss it this week but
clearly you have not been in a position to offer any advice on
this proposal before now.
Professor Dame Janet Finch: I
think that your interpretation that there has been a definite
change is obviously slightly different from my understanding.
Q105 Dr Harris: We agree there were
speeches that attracted interest around policy direction.
Professor Dame Janet Finch: Yes.
Q106 Dr Harris: Did you know they
were going to be made?
Professor Dame Janet Finch: Ministers
do not advise me when they are about to make speeches, no.
Q107 Dr Harris: The point I am getting
at is that you said in your evidence that you have an extremely
close and productive relationship with DIUS ministers, in particular
John Denham and Lord Drayson, yet I think they would say—at
least Lord Drayson said—that this is a really significant
announcement he is making and he came here to do it publicly.
John Denham got a whole group of senior people together last week
to make a speech around that issue too. Are they going to come
and talk to you about this?
Professor Dame Janet Finch: I
am sure they are, absolutely. I do not think I can add much more
to what I have already said about CST's role and the timing of
this.
Q108 Dr Harris: Do you accept that
it could be interpreted that you have been sidelined in a sense
because you could be asked—do you expect to be asked?—to
help advise, if they go down this path, what the strategic areas
are.
Professor Dame Janet Finch: Yes,
and in fact we have already been asked for advice on analogous
topics already if you wish me to comment on them.
Q109 Dr Harris: I know you issued
a report to Alistair Darling on strategic decision making and
technology policy that highlighted six key technologies, including
plastic electronics.
Professor Dame Janet Finch: Indeed.
Q110 Dr Harris: I understand plastic
electronics has not gone so well.
Professor Dame Janet Finch: I
think there are still opportunities in plastic electronics. I
understand this Committee has already undertaken a study of that
to which one of the CST members actually gave evidence to you.
The outcome that particular strategic decision making study was
also to produce a methodology that can be used in other circumstances.
We were invited by Alistair Darling when he was Secretary of State
at the DTI to advise him on how to prioritise technologies which
could come to market within five years. That was the particular
examination question that he put to us. In the process of doing
that we produced a methodology that can be used to answer a slightly
different question in terms of prioritisation and that is a methodology
which we would definitely advocate government to use in other
circumstances.
Q111 Dr Harris: We do not have time
to go into this now, but would you be willing to drop us a note
to let us know how you think that earlier report has been implemented.
Professor Dame Janet Finch: Yes,
certainly.
Q112 Dr Harris: I want to move onto
evidence based policy making. We have issued a report previously
on evidence based policy making and we pointed out that policy
is not dependent on evidence; sometimes you have manifesto commitments,
you have ideology and economics which trump those and that is
legitimate, this is a political place. However, one thing we were
very clear on is that when a policy was described as evidence
based it ought to be evidence based; you should not ignore the
evidence. You should not do it for these other legitimate reasons
and then still call it evidence based because that undermines
the vocabulary. Do you agree that that is a reasonable recommendation,
suggestion and guideline for the Government to follow in policy
areas?
Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve:
Yes it is reasonable and a lot lies behind that. I noted that
the CST report that was launched last night reminds us that government
put £2.8 billion directly into hiring consultants, including
consultants who provide research.. That is a huge amount of research
spend and I think it is a very legitimate question for all of
us whether it is best spent getting the right evidence at the
right time. We know that the relationship between academia and
the Government is not entirely happy and this report has made
many useful suggestions on how to improve it, as has the earlier
report by Sir Alan Wilson which the British Academy produced.
However, in the end a lot of what we have to look at is what are
the incentives. I think the CST report addresses the question
of the incentives for academics, where policy engagement does
not bring peer review kudos, but we need also to look at the incentives
for policy makers and civil servants. There are a lot of ways
in which the commissioning of government funded research could
be made more rigorous. I am not sure this is the context for approved
lists of suppliers; I am not sure that it should not be a requirement
to say that this was or this was not peer reviewed; and to spend
some of the money on seeing whether the policies that then were
implemented—both the regulation and the legislation—were
effective, ineffective or counter-productive. Social science research
can do a lot there, but government needs also to have the incentives
to want to have evidence based policy.
Q113 Dr Harris: I am at a slight
disadvantage because I have not seen this report and I do not
think we were invited to the launch last night.
Professor Dame Janet Finch: I
do apologise for that; that was an omission that has been pointed
out to me.
Q114 Dr Harris: Coming back to my
question, do you agree with our recommendation about the importance
of keeping the vocabulary honest about what is evidence based
policy?
Professor Dame Janet Finch: Certainly.
We would absolutely recognise that government, as you say, has
a number of different considerations where policy is being made,
but if it wishes to base that policy on evidence then it should
be robust evidence.
Q115 Dr Harris: Advisory committees
are best constituted if they include social science as well.
Professor Dame Janet Finch: Yes.
Q116 Dr Harris: I just want to take
one government department at random, the Home Office, and the
way they treat scientific advice. In respect of the Advisory Council
on the Misuse of Drugs which contains social scientists, hard
scientists and clinicians and indeed police representatives, they
gave very clear advice twice about the classification of cannabis
and the Government rejected that advice, as governments are entitled
to do. However, the Government, when rejecting it, did not say
that they were doing it for other reasons; they said that the
Advisory Committee had essentially got the evidence wrong and
had not looked at key things that the Government had looked at.
Given that the Government appoints the Advisory Council on the
Misuse of Drugs do you have any comment on whether it is likely
to be true that the Advisory Council just did its job badly and
looked at the wrong evidence or appraised the evidence wrongly,
or would you say that might be an example of where the Government
has a non-evidence based decision that it wants to disguise as
an evidence based decision?
Professor Dame Janet Finch: I
do not know. I have not studied the detail of that. It is always
possible that advisors to government do not consider the full
range of evidence. We have to accept that that can happen which
is why I emphasised in my last answer to you that all evidence
must be very robustly based. One would hope that scientific advice
always is, but you have to accept the possibility that it sometimes
is not.
Q117 Chairman: Baroness O'Neill?
Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve:
I do not know the particularities of the case but it seems to
me that clarity is achieved by making the advice available on
a routine basis unless there are particular reasons of commercial
confidentiality or security why the advice cannot be made available;
and it is indeed open to government to say, "In this case
there were other considerations which led us not to accept the
advice". If it is advice you can refuse it, but I think it
muddies the waters if people mix up their decision with what the
advice did not say.
Q118 Dr Iddon: In 2006 the House
of Commons Science and Technology sub-Committee recommended that
government should make more use of the tremendous expertise that
lies with the learned societies, academies and professional organisations
in general. Has there been any progress following that advice
we gave in 2006 that you can detect?
Ms Britton: There has been increasing
engagement on this. Certainly now we have a lot of engagement
with the Royal Society. Lord Rees mentioned the work they are
doing on crop productivity which is feeding into Food and Farming
Futures Foresight project. They are also, for instance, together
with other learned societies looking at synthetic biology. The
Royal Academy of Engineering is also looking at the definition
of synthetic biology; how can we get hold of this thing so we
can look at it to see how we can look forward and anticipate,
as with nanotechnologies, what the Government needs to do to encourage
the right things and proceed to regulate where there might be
unnecessary risk. They are getting together with us to look at
those kinds of areas. I think the GSRU—the Government's
Social Research Unit—has been engaging with the British
Academy and other learned societies on the humanities and social
research side to see how better they can engage together. I think
there is quite a lot of this going on and also with smaller learned
societies as well. The Health and Safety Executive have people
like the British Toxicology Society and the British Psychological
Society and so on to actually try to draw out of them things that
can help; the Ergonomics Society and so on. I would also say that
now that we have rather more of these CSAs and most of them come
from learned societies where they have generally been very active
at the top of them so that is another route in, and also a networking
route out to actually engage with the societies' members further.
Q119 Dr Iddon: I have a few questions
on the way the Government consults organisations. Baroness O'Neill,
the British Academy is concerned that the Government's public
consultations are not always carried out to the highest social
science standards. How can we improve the process?
Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve:
I think it is quite difficult for government to improve it, but
there are, nevertheless, questions and they begin with a matter
of timely working, of a degree of anticipation of when you may
need evidence from a particular area and then, as it were, the
first order inquiry is to find the people from whom you are going
to get advice as to which bodies or which particular researchers
might have useful input. You and I know that sometimes these consultations
are ridiculously rushed and poorly constructed, but it is possible
to do better and I think that one of the ways we can help it happen
is to do more to knit together the policy making community and
academic community with quite focussed meetings. For example,
on Monday the British Academy has a forum where we are getting
academics who work on different conceptions of democracy that
have been important in Britain with policy makers, to go through
how they wax and wain and what influence they have or might have.
That would be one example. We are doing one on international relations
and conflict later on. I believe we need on-going relations between
government departments and relevant researchers so that when somebody
finds a problem looming they know roughly where to begin; not
to get the advice but to find the people who can give advice on
where there is good evidence, where there is not good evidence
and, above all—and I take this to be very important—where
the desire for evidence for a certain type cannot be satisfied,
it is not feasible to get the evidence.
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