Chief Scientific Advisers: S&T Committee Report

Lord Jenkin of Roding Excerpts

Wednesday 17th October 2012 Grand Committee

[Lord Jenkin of Roding]

My Lords, I begin by welcoming my noble friend to the Front Bench. It will be the first time that I have spoken in a debate to which he is to reply, and I look forward to that very much.

I warmly commend the committee on what seems to me an extremely valuable and thorough report. Its main purposes were well described by the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, in his introduction. There are of course a number of very important points to which he has drawn our attention and to which I hope we will be able to return.

I want to deal with just one issue, and it can be posed in the form of a question. What is supposed to happen when a chief scientific adviser disagrees with his department’s policy? This was one of the issues explored by the committee. I shall start with the Government’s response, as the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, did. The recommendation was that there should be guidelines for this particularly directed at CSAs. The Government’s response was:

“Evidence given to the Committee by current and former CSAs suggests that this is not a significant problem”.

I disagree with that and I shall give an example. It goes on:

“The Government therefore is not persuaded of the need for a further set of principles specific to the role of CSAs”.

I regard that as a very complacent and disappointing response.

I believe that it is the fundamental job of CSAs to be prepared to challenge their Ministers over a range of issues for which there has to be a proper scientific basis when what is proposed is not in accordance with the scientific evidence or, in the light of the CSAs’ special knowledge, in the best interests of the UK. This can work very well. I took advantage of a short meeting that I had with Sir David King a few days ago to discuss his experience of this. I hope that I am not boring the Committee but this is just to remind us what happened with the foot and mouth epidemic in 2001. Sir David told me that when he came on to the scene the epidemic was clearly going out of control and it appeared that MAFF, the department involved, was not grasping the seriousness of the issue. Sir David became involved and had a meeting with Permanent Secretaries. It was clear that the policy and procedures were not working. They were based on experience of 30 to 35 years earlier and were no longer relevant in the current farming environment.

A team of epidemiological modellers, virologists and logistics modellers was established, who pointed to the need to cull animals at the earliest possible opportunity to avoid the spread of foot and mouth disease, even in advance of a full laboratory test. The immediacy was important and that it should be spread to neighbouring farms as well. He found it necessary to brief the Prime Minister, Mr Blair, and there was subsequently a meeting of COBRA when the policy was outlined and agreed. He promised the Prime Minister that if the models were followed the outbreak would be eradicated by June of that year. At that point the Prime Minister became very interested because he was hoping to have an election in June, so it became very relevant. He kept a close interest and Sir David’s advice was right. He reported to COBRA sometimes twice a day during that whole process. The new strategy was implemented and the result was what had been predicted: cases went down very quickly and the Prime Minister was able to call his election only a week later than he had originally planned. That was a case where the system worked extremely well. I have to say that the election was not the only consequence. After the election the Minister who had been responsible lost his job.

Of course, the Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser has the right of direct access to the Prime Minister over the heads of departmental heads and officials. However, many noble Lords will have had more recent experience which tells a rather different story. It was a rather different situation, but nevertheless I hope that it justifies my statement that the Government’s response is complacent. My interest in this was prompted by a passage in the Select Committee’s report in paragraphs 69 to 71 on what a CSA should do if there is a disagreement with the Government’s policy. There was a sharp difference of views. A number of witnesses told the committee that it should be open and transparent and that what the chief scientific adviser wanted to say should be clear and published. The views came from the Royal Society of Chemistry, the Wellcome Trust, the Institute of Physics and others.

However, another group argued that it should all be held closely within the department. I was particularly struck by a passage cited in the report at paragraph 71, given by Professor David MacKay, the chief scientific adviser of DECC. He expressed a reluctance to disagree in public and said,

“I feel I do my job best if I retain the confidence of ministers. In the past, I used to speak very freely in public and I enjoyed giving frank views, but now I hold those views back more and express them very strongly within the Department, where I feel I am listened to and respected”.

Some of us have recently had the experience of listening to Professor MacKay, and I was struck by the passage in paragraph 71, which I have just quoted. I therefore looked at the evidence to see the context for what the professor was saying on that occasion. There is no printed volume of the evidence; it is nearly 400 pages long and I was told to look at the website. I apologise but I think that this is an important point. A question was asked by the noble Lord, Lord Crickhowell, who is not in his place today. He asked Professor MacKay about CSAs not being bound by ministerial collective responsibility, about whether his reasons for disagreeing with a policy decision had been publicly expressed, and if so, about the reaction of Ministers and others to his department.

We had had the example of hearing Professor MacKay at the nuclear research and development inquiry. Without going into details, the committee was extremely critical of DECC’s policy and attitude, with its lack of evidence of long-term thinking. There were calls for a roadmap going well beyond the 2025 limit, which seemed to be the Government’s forward look. The DECC official who had described the policy was both unconvincing and very negative. He was of course echoed by his then Secretary of State. However, we also heard Professor MacKay, who was very refreshing. As the committee reported, he said that,

“the department is conducting … foresight work on future R&D needs by carrying out a Technology Innovation Needs Assessment … on nuclear which will look beyond the 5-10 year timescale to try to ‘quantify’”,

the need. He went on to describe his pathways programme. To those taking part in those exchanges on that inquiry, that passage clearly gave a very different picture from that given by the official who we had heard earlier. Indeed, we referred to that in paragraph 101 of that report.

Here I come to my main point. Before he gave evidence to that inquiry, Professor MacKay came to ask my opinion. We have had a good relationship over a number of years. He asked, “What does your committee want?”. I said, “David, what we want are your views, not those of your Permanent Secretary”—and, bless him, that was exactly what he did. It greatly helped the committee which, as its report made clear, relied on his evidence as well as that of others for that report. But what happened next? The civil servant who had earlier given evidence to the committee complained to the Permanent Secretary that he had been made to look very foolish. Professor MacKay was then carpeted by the Permanent Secretary and told that he had spoken out of turn.

The consequence lies in the answer that Professor MacKay gave in this report. “Oh yes—I used to talk in public, but now I feel I do better if I don’t”. Is that what we want? If a chief scientific adviser is invited to give evidence to a parliamentary Select Committee, is he not entitled to give his own view, even if it differs from that of a department? Is it really his duty to hold his views back and expose them only within the department? My noble friend Lord Willis said that we were a small, cosy group but of course evidence is heard in public, so this was in public. It would be very helpful if the Government, instead of rejecting the committee’s recommendations for a “set of guidelines”, considered this.

Chief scientific advisers are not the same as departmental civil servants. They have a clear duty to challenge Ministers. They are given much of the independence and authority to be able to do that, as the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, has described, and even on occasions to speak out. I would contend that this is a significant problem, contrary to what was in the answer. I have today had a copy of Sir Bob Kerslake’s letter, which the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, outlined. On recommendation 8, it simply says, “Yes, we’ll make sure that they are subject to the same rules as the civil servants”. That does not answer my question at all. I do not want to hear another repeat of what happened to Professor MacKay after he gave his very useful and telling evidence to the Select Committee on Science and Technology. This has to be dealt with.