Behaviour Change: Science and Technology Committee Report

Lord May of Oxford Excerpts

Wednesday 11th July 2012 Grand Committee

[Lord May of Oxford]

My Lords, the idea of government seeking to change our behaviour is inherently controversial. I should begin by saying what a pleasure and privilege it was to be associated with this inquiry, so ably led by the noble Baroness, Lady Neuberger, with that expression being no less sincere for its conforming to established ritual. The report begins by asserting that, in any instance, the Government should always explain why and what the problem is. They should then go on to make it clear what the evidence is about the problem—what we know and what we do not know—and to make it equally clear what the evidence is for the efficacy of the proposed actions, which is perhaps the most important and difficult thing. All that is a lot easier said than done.

Some of the difficulties have been exposed in an interesting report by the MORI poll organisation, which although it was begun in 2010 was published after our report. It was a study of 18,500 people in 24 different countries and found some paradoxical things. For one, and this is not surprising, public support for intervention is much higher if it is seen to be a problem that directly affects lots of other people—for example, smoking in public places. There is much less support if the problem seems personal—for example, obesity, which is so often seen, although inaccurately, to have just a personal cost as distinct from the large cost that there is to the National Health Service. In another kind of paradox, it found large majorities of public support for many different kinds of specific interventions. However, more than half of those same people then said that they did not think governments should get involved in people’s choices.

To give another example, about one in three of those 18,500 people who filled out the study said that governments should take tougher actions. Yet they also said that the state should not get involved in individuals’ choices about the four particular things being surveyed: eating/obesity, saving for retirement, smoking or sustainability. The report had a wonderful phrase for this, which I was unfamiliar with. It called it cognitive polyphasia, which is more simply summarised as saying that people want their Government to stop the bad behaviour of other people but not necessarily their own behaviour. I should emphasise that there was in those 24 countries a good deal of variation. For example, distinct affirmation for outright prohibition as a measure commanded assent at a level of 87% in Saudi Arabia and India, while at the other extreme it was less than one-third in the United States. In the UK, it was intermediate. In all countries, there was more support for actions and policies aimed at businesses and corporations than those aimed at individuals, forgetting ultimately that businesses and corporations are made up of individuals.

I turn briefly to the report itself to reiterate some things that have already been said and one that has not. As the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, reminded us it is often hard to get good evidence at the population level for how effective an action will be. Such information as we have is often ambiguous and cloudy. That should not stop us from rigorously following the advice on scientific advice in policy-making that was formally articulated in this country in 1996. It was subsequently reviewed in a report that has grown from a few pages to a semi-fat book and reaffirmed several years later by a Select Committee chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin.

The advice emphasises that you should always make it clear what the evidence is and how you have consulted widely and openly, and that you acknowledge openly the uncertainties as well. It points in the direction, as the report does, that this should always deliberately involve the Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser and the chief scientific advisers in the individual departments. In particular, it points out that we should renew the position of the chief social science adviser—and with a really good person this time. These people have to be outsiders who are now insiders, not cosy appointments of civil servants from within, as happened with the Treasury.

The Government also have an obligation, as the report emphasises, to explain how the proposed actions relate to the science advice. This is made especially difficult when they do not. We had some examples of that recently. The dissonance between the expert scientific advice on drug classification and the political decision, with which I have some sympathy, should have been handled much better. The policy direction we are heading in with badgers and bovine TB is basically in flat contradiction of the best scientific advice, so it is very difficult for the Government to explain how they have taken the advice and why they are doing what they are doing when in that case too many people were after policy-based science rather than science-based policy.

Against this background, I re-emphasise how you need to be aware of the state of the science, which often is very partial and incomplete, and, even more importantly, you need to be aware of and explain the evaluation that you are planning for the intervention. One of the things that we found in the inquiry is that all too often the ex post facto evaluation of the measure set in train was not carefully planned in advance. It has to be part of the initial plan.

Finally, a point that deserves revisiting yet again is the question of partnerships between government and business in pursuit of particular interventions. We need to be much more frankly aware of the conflicts of interest involved. In the report, we identified a particular example, the public health responsibility deal network—a wonderful example of the networks my noble friend Lord Hunt referred to—where the pledges that were mooted about marketing alcohol gave explicit priority to the industry’s views, as a result of which six of the health organisations failed to sign up as they were explicitly dissatisfied with that issue and, frankly, I think more health organisations should have refused to sign up.

Rather than end on a rousing peroration, I thought I would read Recommendation 8.24, to which many speakers have already alluded, verbatim because it is a particularly important recommendation about which nothing much has happened yet:

“We invite the Government to explain why their policy on food labelling and marketing of unhealthy products to children is not in accordance with the available evidence about changing behaviour. Given the evidence, we recommend that the Government take steps to implement a traffic light system of nutritional labelling on all food packaging. We further recommend that the Government reconsider current regulation of advertising and marketing of food products to children, taking a more realistic view of the range of programmes that children watch”.

I look forward to the Minister’s reply to this point, and I have sympathy for him. I spent five years of my life as chief scientist in the strange culture of the Civil Service and five years in the Royal Society. I dealt with good conscientious people, but I never ceased to marvel at the confusion that you find there between having a report and lots of committees and actually doing something.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord May of Oxford]

My question was going to be the same but adding the encouraging rider that, as I mentioned, studies show that the public is much more amenable to asking corporations and business to do something than to asking individuals to do something. In the specific case of Recommendation 8.24 about marketing garbage food to children, I should like to hear that something is to be done.

[Lord Reay]

The Minister said that the measures we want to take for public health are not popular and that is one reason why we do not have to do that. A lot of regulatory measures that have been taken have been popular by the time they are taken. You may have to work to get that popularity, as others have suggested. You have to give the public information as to why things are being done.