Paul Atkinson
This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘How did UK policymaking in the COVID-19 response use science? Evidence from scientific advisers’.
Should scientists who want to influence government ‘speak truth to power’, or follow the ‘rules of the game’? Do you make more difference as an outsider or an insider? This matters to any scientist who wants their research findings to have impact. As a former Department of Health civil servant employed in a University public health department, I often work with my Liverpool and Oxford colleagues on achieving ‘policy impact’, and this question arises each time, but it has never mattered more than in the Covid-19 pandemic. So what is the best way to influence government?
It is interesting to see that Susan Michie, a participant in SAGE (the government’s Scientific Advisory Group on Emergencies) has, with a distinguished group of colleagues (2022), recently suggested three lessons from the UK’s Covid-19 experience. In a nutshell, they argue that government scientific advisers need to:
- have greater independence,
- be free to criticise politicians who play fast and loose with scientific evidence and
- be more transparent; advisors should engage with the public more actively.
My own team’s research, based on real-time interviews with government scientific advisers in 2020-21, contains much to support these recommendations. For example, we heard of biomedical scientists commissioned to advise on a topic, only to hear that the decision had been taken without waiting for the results. Modellers struggled with political requirements not to model some scenarios. On transparency, our interviewees were unhappy that their input disappeared into a Whitehall ‘black box’, where the process by which it was combined with other inputs, such as economic advice, was entirely concealed. Michie and colleagues (2022) go further, however. They want the government to change the rules of the game, in ways which, arguably, are unlikely to occur. In this they themselves take on an outsider role, speaking ‘truth to power’. This is an entirely appropriate position for concerned scholars to take: perhaps it is public advocacy and the application of political pressure which will secure these goals.
What, however, does our team’s research suggest that an insider would say about Michie’s advice? One rule of the game, for instance, which insiders follow – if they wish to remain insiders – is not to criticise policymakers in public. Michie and colleagues wish that Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance, SAGE’s co-chairs, had spoken out against ministerial behaviour which broke lockdown rules. But a government scientific adviser needs to retain ministerial confidence in them as a person. Without it, none of their advice lands, even if they do remain in post to offer it. A kind of (at worst) Faustian bargain is made: you (minister) pay attention to what I (scientist) say, and I refrain from criticising you in public.
To commentators outside government, this bargain is all very unsatisfactory. But we need to distinguish between what is and what ought to be. I am (largely) with Michie on the ‘ought’. But our findings agree with Paul Cairney’s (2021), that very little advice from ‘outsiders’ was taken on board in relation to the Covid pandemic. Ministers decide who to listen to mainly on the basis of trust: they listen to ‘their’ scientists, the ones they appointed to committees or advisory posts.
We saw in our research, then, how the production and use of evidence … [was] ‘part of a political process in which the status, power, and strategies of participants can matter more than “the evidence”’. Scientists’ search for policy impact needs to understand and take account of how policy is really made, or else it is itself not evidence-based behaviour.
Image credit: Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash
Paul Atkinson is a contemporary historian based in the Department of Public Health, Policy and Systems at the University of Liverpool, where he works on the governance of health in England (@HealthHistLiv), the use of science in health policy, and policy responses to emerging and zoonotic infections.
Read the original research in Evidence & Policy:
Atkinson, P. Mableson, H. Sheard, S. Martindale, A-M. Solomon, T. Borek, A. and Pilbeam, C. (2022). How did UK policymaking in the COVID-19 response use science? Evidence from scientific advisers. Evidence & Policy, DOI: 10.1332/174426421X16388976414615.
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