§ Mr. Richard Allan (Sheffield, Hallam)I beg to move,
That this House approves the First Report from the Information Committee on the Future of the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (HC 659).
Although the Prime Minister has kindly tabled a motion to allow debate to proceed until any hour, I hope that that hour will not be too far away. I understand that there is general support across the House for the aims of the report. I will briefly describe the thinking of the Committee and the background to the need for POST and explain the key recommendations in the report.
I woke up this morning to hear the "Today" programme headlined by two science issues—bovine spongiform encephalopathy in connection with French beef, and the availability of the drug Relenza in the national health service. It is not uncommon for such key scientific issues to be prominent in the media. I think of issues such as genetics, global warming and climate change, the internet, medicines, stem cell research—the list goes on. Science stories have in some ways replaced the funny item at the end of the news, but they are far more serious and generate more public interest.
The response must be to improve the information sources available to us as legislators. It is sometimes hard for us to admit our ignorance. We are expected to be experts on everything, but science and technology issues often test us and, in many cases, they are not issues of party politics. I would argue that a debate such as the stem cell research debate is tougher than many of the others that we face in the House.
The Select Committee on Information wishes to do all it can to ensure that hon. Members have the best information possible to support their decisions. There is a phrase in computer science, "Garbage in, garbage out." We cannot guarantee that the reverse applies—that quality information in will result in quality legislation out, but the odds on creating good legislation have to be higher if Members are better informed. The recommendations in the report seek to do exactly that.
POST was established on a temporary basis and reviewed by previous Information Committees in 1991 and again in 1995. I know that veterans of that debate are present tonight—the hon. Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Mr. Miller), for example. The key recommendation in the report before us tonight is that POST should be made permanent from April 2001. We believe that that will provide security for the institution and its staff and will make possible some of the other developments for which we have argued in the report.
We hope to see an improved career structure for staff working for Parliament in science and technology. We also recommend that the board structure remain essentially as it is, as it has served POST well. I know that the chairman of the board, the hon. Member for Norwich, North (Dr. Gibson), has devoted a great deal of his time to ensuring the success of POST over recent years, as did the former distinguished chairman, the hon. Member for Rayleigh (Dr. Clark), who chaired the board for a considerable period. The board structure also allows important voices to be brought in from the wider scientific community, which adds to the work of POST.
277 Finally, I refer to some of the key facts that demonstrate the value of POST to date, which we fully expect to be carried into the future. The list of POST notes is in the report and shows how productive the team has been. It is a small team of hard-working and skilled scientists with a high rate of output. Their timeliness has been excellent. I refer the House to the stem cell research report, which it produced in June this year, well ahead of the public debate. This timely and high quality advice is likely to increase in value to Members over time.
The Chairman of the Science and Technology Committee referred to a paper in Nature in his submission to the Information Committee, which demonstrates how science and technology issues have moved up the parliamentary agenda over recent years. I have mentioned the increasing media interest, and Members' postbags will testify to their constituents' growing interest.
I shall bring my comments to a close by quoting some of the evidence that was presented to the Information Committee. In keeping with the debate earlier today, it is from the Chairman of the Select Committee on Northern Ireland Affairs, who wrote to us:
As you might expect, the Committee has made infrequent use of the services of POST as relatively few scientific and technological matters fall within its remit. However, for an inquiry last year, the Committee sought evidence from the Meteorological Office on the possibility that global warming might enhance the frequency of severe storms in Northern Ireland. It received a highly technical submission from the Hadley Centre for Climate Change(part of the Meteorological Office), of which, at the Committee's request, POST promptly prepared an excellent non-technical digest. The language of this formed the basis of the relevant paragraph in the Committee's report.The Committee found it very useful to have the necessary expertise in-house.That submission shows that POST has managed to service a wide variety of Members' interests, including some of the more unlikely Select Committees of the House. I hope that the House will approve the report and put POST on a firm footing to maintain that level of service for years to come.
§ Dr. Ian Gibson (Norwich, North)I am proud to be chair of the POST board, which contains representatives of the Library, Members of both Houses and distinguished scientists from the community outside this place. The board considers all the issues that are relevant today and will be relevant over the next few months, and asks POST employees to get on with the job of providing us with the information that will help us in our debates. That is done in a very neutral way; POST does not take a biased or political view. It is sensitive to people's interests and is extremely informative.
I recently attended, on behalf of the POST board, a meeting in Berlin. There were many people there from other Parliaments who looked forward to having access to information of a scientific, medical or technical nature to inform new legislation. The POST board and its work were held in the highest esteem. Many Governments of other countries have now said, "The structure that you have in the British Parliament is wonderful; we should do that."
I am very proud to have been the chair of the board and to have heard the debates. In a previous life, I was head of a large university department, which attained one 278 of the highest levels of excellence in the research assessment exercise. If I were assessing the POST board and its work, I would say that they were five star, like some of the departments at Oxford, Cambridge and elsewhere. POST's work is amazingly good and very informative.
In many debates in this place hon. Members use what POST says, and many hon. Members read it over their cornflakes or at their dinner table and inform themselves, and benefit from the erudition that is in those documents.
There are many things that we could look forward to doing in terms of science and technology. The hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Mr. Allan) spoke about the paper referred to in Nature. That is the highest accolade of publication. Probably I was one of the authors of the article that is mentioned, and to get it in Nature is five star in itself, which is not bad for an MP—it is better than I ever did when I was the boss of a university department, so being a Member of Parliament is not too bad in terms of being recognised.
On scientific and technological issues, such as telecommunications masts and mobile telephones, POST informs people in this place and the other place of the science and technology involved, the issues that we should focus on and the difficulties of legislation in those areas, based on good and proper science. I am proud to say that POST has distinguished itself internationally. It is recognised across Europe, and many other countries, including the United States, are now adopting the way that it operates. I hope that, in future, one or two additional members of staff will allow us to penetrate other areas of science, such as medicine, that are coming up very fast. The three people who work at POST could be increased to four or five without any detriment to the information that helps us take our decisions.
I hope that the House will support this very thorough report. Many of us have spoken, in Select Committees and elsewhere, of our interest in scientific developments that are taking place countrywide. POST has really been successful in informing the public and getting the public involved in science. No organisation in this country knows better how to get technical and difficult information over to the public. POST has taken on that important role seriously.
Hon. Members will know from the debate on stem cells that we had in the House last Friday that we spent many minutes discussing how the public would understand a stem cell and the potential advantages of the research. POST's report helped that debate and moved it forward.
The House should award its accolades to POST for what it has done from its small base just 200 yards away. We should provide it with the status and permanency that will ensure that we are better informed, that our publications are more effective and that resources are provided. Debates on science, technology and medicine feature more prominently than ever before, and there has been a sixfold increase in the number of parliamentary questions on those subjects in the past few years.
I have heard science quoted in the House that does us real discredit, but POST has helped to raise standards and made us much more scientifically literate. None of us will ever be a Nobel prize winner, but at least we shall understand the issues and be able to talk to our constituents on a much more informed basis. POST has played a major part in enabling us to do that.
§ Dr. Michael Clark (Rayleigh)I welcome the report and thank the hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Mr. Allan) and his Committee for the work that they have done in scrutinising the activities of POST. In the previous Parliament, I had to go before the Information Committee in the same way as the hon. Member for Norwich, North (Dr. Gibson) has done in this Parliament. However, he has had more success than me. I managed to achieve a three-year and a five-year extension, but he has persuaded the Information Committee that POST should become a permanent feature of parliamentary life.
I shall not speak for long, but I would like to reminisce on what happened in 1985, because tonight's decision to make POST a permanent feature of parliamentary life is the culmination of 15 years' work. In 1985, we became aware of the work that the Office of Technology Assessment—the OTA—was doing in the United States to inform Congress and the President of scientific issues. We thought that it would be a good idea to have something similar in this Parliament. Three Members of Parliament went to Washington to study the OTA and produced a report suggesting that we should have such an organisation here.
We went to see the then Prime Minister, now Lady Thatcher, and told her of our plans. She thought that it was a very good idea to have such a body to increase scientific knowledge in Parliament, so we asked for Government funding for it. She replied, "Oh no, certainly not. If it is such a good idea, you will find money for it from industry, academia and institutions outside Parliament." She then reached for her famous handbag, took out her cheque book and wrote a cheque for £100. She said, "Raise the money yourself, and let this be the first £100 to get it going." In the next two years, we raised more than £170,000 and were able to institute POST with just three or four researchers and fellows.
POST was a tight ship and the hon. Member for Norwich, North will agree that it remains a tight ship. Its director, Professor David Cope, uses his resources very efficiently. That contrasts with the OTA, which got bigger and bigger until it became so large and expensive to run that it was disbanded. The organisation on which we modelled ourselves no longer exists, but ours has remained neat and small.
I must pay tribute to our first director, Dr. Michael Norton, who held the post from 1989 to 1998.
§ Mr. Andrew Miller (Ellesmere Port and Neston)indicated assent.
§ Dr. ClarkI am pleased to see the hon. Gentleman nodding. Dr. Norton was a superb director. He got the organisation started with its short notes and longer, more detailed scientific reports. He helped to establish POST' s reputation, and he has left behind a legacy of which he can be proud.
As well as helping parliamentarians with proactive notes about scientific issues of the day, POST is capable of helping, and does help, Select Committees when they want an idea of whether a scientific issue should be investigated. POST will write an initial report for the Committee, and when the Committee has decided on a line of inquiry, POST will assist on scientific matters. Of the advisers that the Science and Technology Committee, 280 of which I am Chairman, has called in to help in its inquiries, more than 50 per cent. have been recommended by POST. The organisation does many things to raise the level of scientific knowledge in the House, and I am pleased that we are welcoming the Information Committee's report.
In my evidence to the Committee, I remarked:
Parliamentary funding provides POST with an enviable degree of independence,and, as I said way back in 1994,makes the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology far more Parliamentary and no less scientific or technological.I welcome the report and commend those who have studied POST and concluded that it should become a permanent feature of the parliamentary estate. I am sure that all hon. Members wish it well in the future.
§ Mr. Andrew Miller (Ellesmere Port and Neston)I want to put on record my thanks to the hon. Member for Rayleigh (Dr. Clark) for doing a splendid job when he was chairman of POST. He developed the organisation from the original form that he described. I did not realise that I would find myself on the same side as Lady Thatcher on the issue of Parliament's need for advice. The hon. Gentleman transformed POST in 1994 by persuading the House and the Information Committee to move towards the model that we now have.
The hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Mr. Allan) rightly praised the work of my hon. Friend the Member for Norwich, North (Dr. Gibson) in his capacity as chairman of POST. There has been continuity in the work that has been done, and as the only Member who has been on the Information Committee in the two Parliaments, I have studied that work carefully. I took the Committee's decision on POST extremely seriously because it concerned the spending of public money, which is what we are discussing now.
I urge those who have any doubts about POST to read annexe 4 on pages 20 to 23 of the report which lists the excellent papers that POST has produced. Those must be beneficial to Members of Parliament. I started my career—not quite so eminently as my hon. Friend—in a university laboratory and left some years later, having developed several important X-ray technologies. I make it clear that my scientific background is not enough; there is a huge gap in my knowledge on scientific matters, as there is in the knowledge of every hon. Member.
It is a weakness in all our legislative procedures that we do not fully understand the scientific and ethical issues surrounding the difficult decisions that we make, and we will fail in our responsibilities to our constituents unless we achieve that understanding. POST is an excellent way, at a low cost, to help inform Parliament.
The hon. Member for Rayleigh referred to what has happened in the United States and my hon. Friend the Member for Norwich, North referred to his recent meeting in Berlin. It is clear from Parliaments elsewhere in the world, including some of the emergent democracies, that there is a desire for parliamentarians to receive better scientific information. Few of us come from scientific disciplines and there is a desire for our knowledge base to be increased. POST is a vehicle that will enable that to happen.
281 I congratulate the POST board on its activities in this and the previous Parliament. I fully endorse—as a member of the Information Committee, I would because the report was unanimous—the remarks of the hon. Member for Hallam. POST is an excellent body and we need more of it.
§ Dr. Nick Palmer (Broxtowe)I declare an interest because the director of the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology, Professor David Cope, is one of my constituents; he is typical of the scientific excellence that we come to associate with Broxtowe.
As the points made by those who preceded me summarised what I wanted to say, I shall not detain the House for long. I suspect that, like many hon. Members, when I receive a glossy document in the post, printed with many pictures and 40 pages long, my instinct is to chuck it in the bin. That is the fate of much of the printed matter that comes through the post.
The reports from POST, rather like Le Monde, are usually not illustrated. If they are, the illustrations are pertinent. The reports are four pages long and they pass what my hon. Friend the Member for Norwich, North (Dr. Gibson) described as the cornflakes test—we can understand a complex issue while eating, or drinking, a bowl of cornflakes.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Mr. Miller) said, Members have great difficulty in grasping the complexity of many issues; I am one of those Members. It is surprising that we are expected to be familiar with so many issues. It is essential that we have a body such as POST, which is able to provide information that is small and perfectly formed—like the organisation itself.
§ Mr. John Bercow (Buckingham)Speaking as someone who is certainly small but would not claim for one moment to be perfectly formed, I am intrigued by what the hon. Gentleman has to say. I am conscious of the scientific expertise with which he speaks. He will be aware of the document entitled "The Sun and Space Weather", which was produced in November 1999. Perhaps he can enlighten me as to its central thesis.
§ Dr. PalmerThe hon. Gentleman has been watching too much of "Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?"
POST is a good predictor of issues to come. Stem cells have already been mentioned. Another issue that arose a few months ago was that of carbon sinks, which is now the central debating ground for the post-Kyoto conference. We would be in a mess without POST. We need it permanently. Let us keep it.
§ Mr. Dominic Grieve (Beaconsfield)It has been an interesting debate, and having listened carefully to my hon. Friend the Member for Rayleigh (Dr. Clark), I have little to add to it. The official Opposition's view is that the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology performs a valuable function. The only point that arises from reading the report, and which may properly be noted, is that one dissenting voice suggested that at times POST overlapped with the activities of other briefing committees. I think that the Select Committee on Defence 282 expressed that view. However, that is a detail—a simple matter of co-ordination that can easily be addressed by the board itself. The value of the reports is beyond doubt; I have read several and found them informative. I hope that the House will approve the Committee's report.
§ The Parliamentary Secretary, Privy Council Office (Mr. Paddy Tipping)I am pleased to follow so many colleagues who have a scientific background. The hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Mr. Allan), my hon. Friend the Member for Norwich, North (Dr. Gibson), the hon. Member for Rayleigh (Dr. Clark) and my hon. Friends the Members for Ellesmere Port and Neston and for Broxtowe (Dr. Palmer) all have a science degree. I do not think that that is true of the hon. Member for Beaconsfield (Mr. Grieve) and it is certainly not true of me. I readily confess that I doubt that I would pass even the cornflakes test: I regularly receive and read POST reports and, sometimes, I have had to read them two or three times to understand them properly. I shall certainly follow up the report mentioned by the hon. Member for Buckingham (Mr. Bercow).
Science and the explanation of science is important to all parliamentarians—for example, in connection with issues such as genetically modified organisms, stem cell research and BSE and its links with CJD. A more practical matter of concern to many of our constituents is telecommunications, the subject of the Stewart report. All are important issues that Members of Parliament need to learn about and understand. I was strongly struck by the example of the Select Committee on Northern Ireland Affairs going to POST for advice. One the points highlighted in the recent Liaison Committee report is the need for central services to advise Select Committees.
§ Mr. Peter Lilley (Hitchin and Harpenden)I confess to knowing little about the existence of POST. Several key issues have been mentioned, one of which is being discussed now by the Deputy Prime Minister, yet POST does not appear to have included in any of its reports an evaluation of whether global warming is occurring and, if so, to what extent. Why is that?
§ Mr. TippingI know that the right hon. Gentleman has had little time to study these matters, but I understand that POST has examined that issue. One of the main issues being addressed by The Hague conference is the concept of carbon sinks—a difficult issue that needs a great deal of work. POST has achieved a lot, but those who are involved with it know that there remains much to be done.
§ Mr. AllanLet me assist the Minister and save him time that he might otherwise spend going through the reports. I can refer him to the 1990 report on global warming, the 1992 report on global warming update and subsequent reports, from the 1993 report on carbon dioxide levels to the report published in October this year on implementing the Kyoto climate change agreements.
§ Mr. TippingLet me conclude by saying that I do not think that sufficient attention is given to science, its importance and the need to promote it. In my view,
283 the debate on GMOs has been characterised by ignorance. There is far more to be done, and I am delighted that POST is there to inform us.
Question put and agreed to.
Resolved,
That this House approves the First Report from the Information Committee on the Future of the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (HC 659).
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