Sue Mayer calls for evidence of progress so far

The introduction of the government’s guidelines on scientific analysis in policy making was an important response to the BSE and other crises where scientific advice and its use was poor.

Their regular revision is also important, and the proposed new guidelines reflect some important new thinking - especially about public engagement. They emphasise the need for public engagement to be real and to help in framing the risk issue.  This is very welcome.

In some places, the proposed guidelines could go further. They emphasise the need to publish the evidence and analysis and relevant papers, but most scientific advisory committees still meet in secret. Opening this part of the process up would help a new culture of accountability to emerge and is likely to ensure assumptions and framings are considered.

But what is really missing is an audit of how the government has dealt with scientific advice in the past five years - the extent to which this has followed the guidelines and where any problems have arisen. Building such an ‘evidence based’ approach (to use the jargon of the document) to the process would make it much more robust.

GeneWatch’s reponse

Therefore, GeneWatch’s main response to the consultation is that, before finalising the guidelines, the Chief Scientific Advisor should ask government departments to explain the impact the guidelines have had on their practices in the past five years – how have they sought expertise, what evidence is there that it represents a wide range of knowledge and views, any difficulties and so forth.  He should also commission independent assessments of three or four cases studies, drawn from different areas, to see where any weaknesses exist in making the laudable aims of the guidelines bite.

GeneWatch UK’s proposals for the science advice case studies would be the UK Biobank, TB in badgers and the latest GM contamination case with Syngenta’s Bt10 maize. There’s likely to be good and bad practice among these and plenty of lessons to be learnt.  The audit process should itself be based on the guidelines.

Without an audit, the guidelines may just amount to a lot of fine words which we further refine and polish or they may be failing to address key problems.  We simply don’t know – let’s examine the evidence!

Dr Sue Mayer is Director of GeneWatch UK