Rules against lobbying government threaten advice on science

The UK government plans to make it illegal for learned societies to spend public money to give it unbiased expert advice.

The mission of the Royal Society, the UK's leading scientific body, is “to recognise, promote, and support excellence in science and to encourage the development and use of science for the benefit of humanity”. As a part of this mission one of its priorities is “Providing scientific advice for policy”. If the government has its way, that priority will bite the dust.

The government thinks that anyone who takes taxpayers' money should be banned from “lobbying” government and Parliament. You can read the bald facts here: Government announces new clause to be inserted into grant agreements. This says that “Organisations receiving government grants will be banned from using these taxpayer funds to lobby government and Parliament.” To this end:

“A new clause to be inserted into all new and renewed grant agreements will make sure that taxpayer funds are spent on improving people’s lives and good causes, rather than lobbying for new regulation or using taxpayers’ money to lobby for more government funding.”

There is just one problem for the research community and the likes of the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering (RAE), another body with a remit to advise government, grants could include the money that they receive from government to do the work that is their raison d’etre.

As its website puts it:

“The Royal Society receives a grant from the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS). This supports work on scientific excellence and innovation, science and mathematics education, international activities and science communication activities.”

In 2015/16, BIS gave the RS £47.101 million. The latest accounts for the RAE (pdf file), for the year ending 31 March 2015, show that it received £13.1 million from BIS.

Like the RS, the RAE, the RS's engineering equivalent, spends some of this money collecting and presenting advice to government. As the RAE puts it: “The Academy undertakes a range of activities to ensure that engineering is at the heart of policy-making, providing authoritative, impartial advice and expertise.”

All of this could well fall foul of the proposed wording in grants agreements issued under the new regime. This would rule out:

“Payments that support activity intended to influence or attempt to influence Parliament, government or political parties, or attempting to influence the awarding or renewal of contracts and grants, or attempting to influence legislative or regulatory action.”

Bang goes all that work on impartial, advice.

The RS and RAE sometimes work together in their roles as advisors. For example, in July 2015 they put together their Response to the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee inquiry into the environmental risks of fracking. What is the point of that study if its does not “influence or attempt to influence Parliament, government or political parties”.

Sometimes the government even asks these bodies for help. For example, in 2014, the then Minister for Universities, Science and Cities, Rt Hon Greg Clark MP, asked Dame Ann Dowling DBE FREng FRS, and now the President of the RAE, “to lead a review examining how government can support the development of more effective collaborations between businesses and university researchers in the UK”. Could a successor do the same if it meant urging the Academy to break the law?

In recent years, the RAE has also opined on:

• Innovate UK’s integration with Research UK
• Higher education: teaching excellence, social mobility and student choice
• Relationship between EU membership and UK science
• the Nurse Review of Research Councils
• Digital Communications Infrastructure Strategy
• Science and Innovation Strategy
• Emerging technologies

For its part, in recent times the Royal Society has published advice on:

• EU regulation of the life sciences
• Innovate UK’s integration with Research UK
• The global humanitarian system
• Purpose and quality of education in England

It also wrote a “Letter to the Rt Hon Sir Stephen Sedley regarding the delayed publication or withholding of government research”.
It is hard to see how either body could have written on subjects like those without running the risk of being accused of trying to “lobby government and Parliament”. Isn’t that the whole point?

And what will the government’s lawyers say about the comments of the RS and RAE, along with the Academy of Medical Sciences and the British Academy, two further recipients of government grants, on party manifestos at election time? These bodies “urge the next government to strengthen public investment in research and innovation”.

Even though they even handedly say that they are “pleased to see that four of the five manifestos make commitments in this area”, that statement might well provoke a slap over the wrists under the proposed law. What are these bodies doing sticking their noses into our manifestos?

Petition position

The research community itself fears that the same new law would hit anyone who receives a grant from a Research Council, which is government money after all, without also falling foul of the proposed new law. That is why some aggrieved researchers have promulgated one of those petitions to parliament.

This petition, which may itself to have benefited from government grants to pay the individuals who launched it, warns:

“The Cabinet Office has announced that a new ‘anti-lobbying’ clause will be included in all Government grants from May 2016. This is an attack on academic freedom as it would stop grants for university research being used to influence policy-makers. It is bad for the public interest and democracy.”

The petition then points out that the proposed ‘no lobbying with our cash’ law “does not mention that Government grants for research in universities and research institutes would be covered by the new clause”. It then goes on to say that “The Government should ensure that grants from the higher education funding councils and research councils to support research are exempt from this new clause.”

The petition does not address the issue of organisations that hand out that money. But they also need protection from this asinine edict.

Corridors of powerlessness

Organisations like the RS and RAE don’t jump up and down in public  or start petitions when dodgy legislation threatens their livelihood. That would look too much like lobbying. Instead they quietly go into ‘corridors of power mode’, as one president of the RS described it to me long ago. Sadly, it seems that those behind-the-scenes mutterings have fallen on deaf ears in Whitehall.

If anything, the explanation of how the new rules will work confirm the fears of the organisations involved. The notes pose the question: “Should the clause be included for all types of grant recipient – e.g. public sector organisations and individuals?” The answer is clear: “Yes, the presumption is that this clause is always included.”

The notes do go on to say “Grant recipients are still free to engage in lobbying but should not fund this sort of activity from government grants unless it is specifically part of the terms of the grant itself.” But that would eliminate much of the work of the national academies. Unlike the charities that raise money from the public, they don’t have chuggers with their clipboards accosting shoppers on the high streets, or call centres harassing charitable old people and urging them to hand over their savings.

Sock puppets

There are, as yet, no plans to exempt researchers or the organisations that represent them from the new regime. So they will sit alongside what the government’s announcement, citing the Institute of Economic Affairs, calls “so-called ‘sock puppets’”.

At one stage there was much talk in Whitehall and Westminster of a need for ‘evidence based policy’. In other words, if you want to change the way in which the NHS works, for example, you first analyse the issue, gathering the evidence and then trying to devise policies that will bring about the desired effects. In its plans to make the NHS a “24-7” operation, the current government seems to have turned that on its head. It now prefers ‘policy based evidence’. "Here’s what we want to do, go and find the evidence to prove that it makes sense."

Perhaps this is why the government refuses to make an exception in the new grant wording for research and the bodies that promote it. It does not want those pesky national academies offering advice that could make policies look even more daft and ill considered than they now do. Who needs input from researchers and experts who actually know what they are talking about when you can listen to all those political think tanks that exist purely to tell you what to do?

So, farewell then Susan Greenfield

The recent turmoil at the Royal Institution has sparked off some thoughtful comments by people who know what they are talking about. One such came from Professor Colin Blakemore in The Times. When I tried to add these comments to the article, they vanished into the ether, perhaps because they are too long and rambling. So, here they are, for others to judge, should anyone be interested in the views from someone who was around at the time.

As Colin Blakemore says, the Bodmer report lit a bomb under what some of us call the Public Engagement in Science and Technology (PEST) movement. (It started of as "Public Understanding", but that was deemed to be too patronising.) The report led to COPUS, the Committee on the Public Understanding of Science, which brought together the Royal Society (RS), British Association for the Advancement of Science (BA) and Royal Institution (RI) in what could have been a powerhouse for public communication.

The first two organisations went into overdrive. Even the Royal Society, ostensibly the stuffier of the three, became really enthusiastic about PEST. Other players, such as the Science Museum and the Wellcome Trust, picked up ideas and made them work. The RI sat on its hands.

Unlike the BA and RS, which were led by people who made their enthusiasm for public engagement clear to anyone who would listen, especially if they had money to hand out, those then in charge at the RI had little time for PESTs. They still saw the RI as a quiet haven in the middle of London for world leading researchers that would deliver yet more Nobel Prizes. That is why they rejected attempts to engineer a merger between the RI and the BA, then less healthy than it is now, and to develop the RI's buildings.

The RS remains stuck in overdrive on all fronts, proving that good science and public engagement can coexist and even feed off one an other. The BA, in its new home, and with its new name, the British Science Association (BSA), no longer needs the RI.

Does anyone?

Even after a decade with a leader who rejected the stuffier view of science, the RI as a whole, rather than its director, hasn't achieved the visibility that its excellent work deserves and that could have attracted financial backing.

The RI's biggest asset is its building. It may also be its biggest liability. But without the buildings it might as well hand its various PEST activities over to the RS or BA.

Visit the "members' rooms" at the learned societies and you will soon see that there is a real need for a venue in London where scientists who are not eminent enough to be allowed into the Royal Society can while away an hour or two and grab a bite and perhaps rub shoulders with an interested public.

Would a Groucho Club for scientists make money? Perhaps in the longer term. But is there time?

The RI and its director – history rewritten

It has taken the kerfuffle at the Royal Institution to wake me up here. Reading the growing flood of material on the current state of the RI, and the redundancy notice handed out to Baroness Susan Greenfield, suggests that some people seem to have forgotten their history.

Baroness Greenfield has been in the job so long – can it really be 11 years? – that some of the younger bloggers commenting on the saga were probably still at school when she became director. For this reason we can forgive them for not knowing about the history of the RI before the regime of Professor Greenfield, as she still was until 2001.

You cannot apply the same excuse to Professor Lisa Jardine, who was, as the Guardian reminds us, a former member of the RI's governing council. The newspaper quotes Jardine as saying of RI directors "It has been always a charismatic scientist supported by a membership."

This is not the case. There have been some charismatic scientists in charge, perhaps most notably Professor Sir George Porter, who was eminent enough not just to be elected to the Royal Society, but to be, at one time, both the President of the RS and the Director of the RI. But there have been some directors of recent memory who were fine scientists but who were at the back of the queue when they handed out the charisma gene.

While this hardly changes the goings on at the RI, it could be seen as rewriting history, something that you would not expect of Professor Jardine.

As an observer of the RI for more than a quarter of a century, and at one time a member of a committee advising on its future, it has always struck me as an odd place. Down in the depths of the venerable old building, a prime site in the middle of London, they carried out experiments that would horrify some health and safety zealots, what with all those gas cylinders.

More important than the safety was the puzzle about its status as a research organisation. It just didn't make much sense in today's scientific environment. The RI got away with it simply because it was the RI.

For years, the quality of that research was undeniable. That is partly because of the eminence of the director. This probably explained the RI's ability to attract research funds.

But scientific eminence does not guarantee charisma or an ability to fulfil the RI's other role, as a place for public engagement in science. Some directors failed hopelessly on that front. So it is misleading to suggest that all directors managed to balance scientific excellence with public engagement.

The evidence of this failure shows in the RI's contribution to the late but not much lamented Committee on the Public Understanding of Science. (I should declare an interest here, I was one of the first members of this body.) COPUS, which grew out of the Bodmer report of 1985 on the public understanding of science, existed in part to bring together the Royal Society, the Royal Institution and the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BA), as the British Science Association was then known.

Before COPUS, the BA was really the brand leader on public engagement in science and technology (PEST), as this activity is now known. Before COPUS, the RS was itself pretty stuffy and far from a leading player in public engagement. But it soon learned how to improve its PESTery, thanks partly to the enthusiasm of Sir George and his willingness to take the RS in that direction.

The BA also became more dynamic and forged ahead in the PEST arena. The RI somehow seemed to miss out on the game. That all changed significantly during Baroness Greenfield's regime.

Quite how much of the improvement in the RI's work on PEST is due to Greenfield is for others to decide. I haven't been as closely involved in events as I once was. So it would be unwise to comment on the current kerfuffle. But anyone who does feel the urge to write about it might find it useful to look at the history of the RI.

As the accounts of recent events remind us, the RI's history is long. This year it marks 200 years "as a member organisation". That history precedes by centuries the era of the internet. It is, therefore, beyond the reach of Google. A proper understanding of even the RI's relatively recent past needs a somewhat old fashioned approach to research which almost certainly involves reading bits of paper.

Nuclear is an adjective – but don't tell the Royal Society

In its consultation document on the future of nuclear power, the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) wisely avoids using the term "nuclear option". Even the overarching White Paper avoids the phrase, except when quoting a third party exercise.

The problem with the phrase is that you will find it used in many contexts to describe the most drastic option you can take, as in nuclear weapons. For example, the "nuclear option" crops up as a description in the Washington Post of the tactics used in the US Congress to block the president's nominations for top jobs.

It isn't, then, a good idea to use the term "nuclear option" when what you really mean is the option to build new nuclear power stations.

The same need for careful use of language should also acknowledge that the word nuclear is actually an adjective. Its origins are in the nucleus. Nuclear weapons and nuclear energy depend on smashing up nuclei. Nuclear magnetic resonance, the old name for magnetic resonance imaging before the "N" word fell out of favour, also depends on doing things with nuclei.

Someone should tell this to the Royal Society. This august body, the highest in the land, by its own reckoning, when it comes to science, has put out the inevitable statement in the wake of the White Paper.

In the Royal Society response to Government energy plans we read that "in the short to medium term nuclear could be crucial in helping the UK tackle the challenges of climate change and security of supply". Nuclear what?

Picky? Yes. But when you are dealing with opponents who like to hold up nuclear weapons as a reason for not using nuclear power it seems silly to offer them a hostage to fortune.

It takes very little to use the right words. If the DTI can do it, why not the RS?

Slaves to science

One of the delights of the Royal Society is its historical archive. It must be one of the oldest repositories of scientific history.

It is also good that the RS takes this part of its activity seriously. Hence its efforts to buy up important documents when they become available, even when they were previously "liberated" from the RS's own collections by dubious means.

The latest entry on the history front is the piece on Slavery and the Royal Society. There is also a short video by Professor Lisa Jardine, whose dad, Jacob Bronowski, was also a fine commentator on the history of science.

The piece points out that certain prominent members of the RS were themselves involved in companies that were active in the slave trade.

Now, of course, the only form of slavery that the RS supports is that of lab grunts who are chained to their test tubes and petri dishes in the pursuit of yet more publications.

Royal let down on climate change

Anyone who was hoping for something substantial in the way of a response from the Royal Society on today's IPCC report on climate change is in for a disappointment. We mention this only because they trailed their response earlier today in the puzzlingly content free press release we've already mentioned. Now that we have it, we find that despite the title, A time for action on climate change, it is actually less outspoken than the statements made by the Government's Chief Scientific Adviser, Professor Sir David King.

The bottom line is that "We need both to reduce our emissions of greenhouse gases and to prepare for the impacts of climate change. Those who would claim otherwise can no longer use science as a basis for their argument." Well, I never.

tag: Royal Society, press releases, climate change, IPCC

Royal Society winds up the excitement

The poor old Royal Society has sunk to new depths of pointlessness in its latest "press release". Like everyone they are keen to climb on the bandwagon shoved down the hill today by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. So we get to read the Royal Society pre IPCC report statement.

They have persuaded Martin Rees, President of the Royal Society, to say: "The IPCC is the world's leading authority on climate change and its latest report will provide a comprehensive picture of the latest scientific understanding on the issue."

Er, yes. Maybe the point of this exercise is to alert all those slavering hacks to the fact that "The Royal Society will be issuing a short statement in reaction to the report on Friday".

Most of the writers who will cover the report are clearly desperately short of people they can talk to.

tag: Royal Society, climate change, IPCC, press releases

The clock ran out the mouse

The "doomsday clock" promulgated by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is a PR stunt of breathtaking simplicity, and longevity. The clock is 60 this year, making it one of the oldest marketing tricks around.

Originally there to warn of impending nuclear Armageddon, the clock is now just one of those portfolio tools that doom mongers throw around. To confirm its status as a PR stunt, look no further than the Royal Society, which now latches on to any piece of paper with a slightly scientific tinge and uses it as an excuse to cook up quotes from its President. The latest such emanation, Martin Rees comment on doomsday clock, contains the usual stuff that is all to easy to agree with but that leaves you asking "so what?"

The answer to that so what, of course, is that an increasingly gullible science media will give mileage to this stuff. Optimists will say that it is a sign that science is now more important, hence the media interest. More cynical souls will say that the Royal Society puts it out because it knows that an uncritical media will publish just about anything thrown at it.

tag: Royal Society, press releases, PR, science journalism