Chief Scientific Advisers: S&T Committee Report

Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe Excerpts

Wednesday 17th October 2012 Grand Committee

[Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe]

My Lords, I am very pleased that the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, has secured this opportunity to consider his committee’s hard-hitting and incisive report. So let me be equally trenchant. This report is hard-hitting because it needs to be. Science is essential to robust policy-making. At a most basic level, science and engineering are essential to finding practical solutions to problems. The fact that all government departments now have a chief scientific adviser, with the inexcusable—in my view—exception of the DCMS, is the measure of the progress made in recent years to ensure that the Government have access to the best scientific expertise and advice. However, science is not yet taken as seriously as it should be in the Civil Service, despite strides in the past 10 or 15 years in having science embedded in decision-making. I had years of dealing with the Civil Service in my time as a trade union official, and I know just how difficult it is to get generalists to take science and specialism seriously. Other noble Lords have made a similar point.

With that in mind, I wish to state both my strong support for the report’s recommendations and my concern at what seemed to me to be a pretty feeble response from the Government. I would like to focus particularly on recommendation 9, that all CSAs should be graded at either Permanent Secretary or Director General level, to ensure that they have the authority and the ability to work across the whole department. The noble Lord, Lord Krebs, made it clear that the role and status of the CSA was one of the main reasons for the inquiry leading to this timely report. I believe that the status and independence of the chief scientific adviser role cuts to the heart of the matter. I draw noble Lords’ attention to paragraphs 74 to 76 in the report, relating to grading, where a former CSA comments on the Civil Service as being rather “status-obsessed” and where the discussion is focused on the hierarchical reality and grade culture of the Civil Service.

This report stresses that it is vital that the chief scientific adviser in any government department be suitably senior. I believe strongly that incumbents of this role, so crucial to evidence-based policy, must have the necessary standing and authority, not just within the scientific community, but to gain access and exert influence where it matters within the Civil Service. Witnesses to the committee’s inquiry repeatedly highlighted the importance of CSAs having access to Ministers and to senior departmental officials and the need for CSAs to be involved early and throughout the policy process. Professor Paul Wiles, former CSA to the Home Office, made the point pretty succinctly by observing that part of the job of a CSA is to make sure that they kick the door down, frankly.

There are plenty of examples in this report of what follows when the door is kept obdurately shut, or when there is no one kicking at the door, or when you simply do not kick hard enough. These include the proposals for biometric ID cards, plans for offshore wind power—as mentioned earlier—and the closure of the Forensic Science Service. A more recent failure comes to mind, that of the franchising process for the West Coast Main Line. We do not yet know the full details, but if civil servants’ risk assessment was incomplete and if economic and financial modelling was inadequate, we can but wonder whether the absence of a chief scientific adviser to the Department of Transport was a factor.

While the report acknowledges that the picture varies across government departments, there are too many examples of where expert advice has been ignored, dismissed or not sought early enough to influence decisions. That failure to either ask for or take expert advice has undermined policy too many times. In the report the Home Office Science and Engineering SEA review is cited as finding a consistent,

“lack of appreciation of the value and importance of scientific evidence among (especially senior) officials”.

The BIS CSA review findings are summarised as showing that some policy officials had little enough motivation to ensure that potentially excellent advice from the then CSA incumbent went through.

It is all the more frustrating, therefore, to note the Government’s response to this report. They seem particularly pusillanimous on the independence of CSAs. To give just a few examples, I return to the question of the CSA’s standing and authority, in recommendation 1, and the importance for a CSA to be a heavyweight within the scientific community. In their response the Government appear to agree, but then say that each department—with, admittedly, the GCSA—should be able to determine this as,

“some of the … expertise may be provided by a support team and therefore may not be a high priority for the CSA”.

Just whose wishes are being served here? The CSA needs to be able to stand up to belligerent Ministers or civil servants, yet here the Government are already bending over backwards to leave it to each department to decide who it is prepared to listen to.

Recommendation 2, that CSAs should be external appointments, is rejected by the Government on the grounds that:

“Departments must be free to carry out open and fair recruitment … without bias as to existing positions of candidates”.

I have more sympathy with this position, but nevertheless I believe that the expectation should be an outside appointment. Sir John Beddington made this point very effectively in his evidence to the committee, and I echo the praise from the noble Lord, Lord Willis, for Sir John in his role. It needs to be recognised that the conventions and trappings of a long career in the Civil Service are hard to shake off.

The Government also rejected recommendation 4, that the GCSA and the head of the Civil Service should look again at current arrangements where the CSA role is combined with other departmental roles. Given the importance of this part-time role, why will they not do this? What are they afraid of? A review may indeed show up weaknesses that need to be dealt with.

There is more government complacency in their rejection of recommendation 16, which suggests that the GCSA, the Government Office for Science and the head of the Civil Service should evaluate departmental scientific advisory bodies to see whether they are the most effective way to critique the departmental use of science and to suggest improvements. In their reply the Government say that they are content with current arrangements for reviewing science advisory councils. They show no recognition that over time a department may become part of groupthink, becoming progressively less independent or brave in its reviews.

The Government’s failure to embrace the committee’s longsighted view on the need for independence in the CSAs’ role is deeply frustrating. No wonder there is talk of kicking down doors. In my view, the report is a well aimed and timely shot across the bows in the long-running skirmish between the Civil Service and science. If we are truly to have evidence-based policy, if we want to be sure that robust, joined-up evidence is at the core of decisions within departments and across government, it is vital that some if not all of the salvos contained in the report hit home.

When I look at the membership of the Science and Technology Committee, I stand in awe of its expertise. Parliament ignores such advice at its peril, and I hope that the Minister will reassure us that it will not be ignored.