Oral evidence: Science in emergencies: chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear incidents, HC 163Tuesday 7 June 2016
Oral evidence, 7 June 2016.
Witnesses
Phil Evans, Government Services Director, Met Office, Dr Dame Sue Ion FREng FRS, Chairman, Nuclear Innovation Research Advisory Board, and Dr Edward Sykes, Senior Media Manager, Science Media Centre, gave evidence.
Chair
I welcome the second panel to our hearing. Thank you for being so patient and waiting for us while we voted. I am sorry. We expected the vote to be a little earlier, but you are very kind to have taken the time. Can I jump right in by asking you, Dr Ion, what involvement your organisation has had with either SAGE or the scientific and technical advice cells? Is that something with which you on the advisory board would be engaging directly?
Dr Ion
SAGE tends to work with independent experts allocated to whatever the SAGE emergency is. Any member of the Nuclear Innovation Research Advisory Board who is on SAGE would be there as an independent expert because of their own personal expertise. As for myself, I served on the SAGE that followed Fukushima, which predated the days of the Nuclear Innovation Research Advisory Board. NIRAB is just a board that advises Departments of State about the requirements for research to underpin the national nuclear strategy, so it does not have a formal relationship in SAGE space. As an individual, I have also served on a number of emergency exercises at civil nuclear power plants and sites like Sellafield when I worked within the sector. I have been part of and run emergency exercises with local authorities, fire and police services and other emergency services in the past.
Chair
That is very helpful. We are just trying to understand the architecture of scientific advice. Mr Evans, how would the Met Office and the different organs of scientific advice in the context of an emergency interrelate?
Phil Evans
We do if it is relevant, and their expert scientists are relevant to the particular issue. It is broader than just CBRN. We will be a member of SAGE; we will be involved in STAC and very often COBRA as well, so we are quite involved in the process.
Chair
I am starting to feel that I need to ban acronyms.
Dr Ion
Perhaps, hopefully, I can be more helpful. Most of the Departments of State have scientific advisory groups of one sort or another. They are not all constituted in the same way, but, generally speaking, they are deemed to have experts who are nationally or internally recognised as such. GO-Science maintains a register of members of those committees who have agreed to be on call should a SAGE be required, and that is how some of the scientific advice is tapped into in so far as they are constituting a SAGE specifically for a radiological, chemical or biological incident.
Chair
That leads neatly to my next question. In your experience, do you think the right people are being tapped into quickly enough for SAGE in CBRN scenarios? The second part of that question is: do you think there is a need for a better connection, not just with obvious scientific experts from the academic and research environments but from industry?
Dr Ion
I can only give you the experience from the role I had in the post-Fukushima SAGE. At that time all the right people were drawn in very quickly from our National Nuclear Lab, our regulator, the ONR, the Health Protection Agency, as it was then, the Met Office and known key individual experts and UK academics like Robin Grimes, who subsequently became CSA Foreign Office, and Professor Andrew Sherry. The right experts were all drawn together to enable the advice to be discussed with the chief scientific adviser—at the time Sir John Beddington—and passed onward to COBRA.
Chair
Would you share that view, Mr Evans?
Phil Evans
I would.
Dr Ion
The setting up of the SAGE at the time and drilling into the right expertise was very fast. The benefit of having the presence of the national labs on it is that they have the reach-back into their organisations to get a very fast response and analytical work done to back up opinions being formed by the SAGE as events evolve. I suspect the Met Office would be in the same positon as the National Nuclear Lab.
Chair
One of the issues that arose during our Ebola inquiry was a degree of confusion about the route in for advice from various advisory groups and committees, and essentially how it was going to filter up the system. You guys have been in the system, so you know the structure, but do you think scientists in different parts of the structure are really aware of the differences—I am going to use acronyms now—between SACs, STACs and SAGEs, and how they interrelate and where they fit into it? Do you think the awareness level is really there?
Dr Ion
Perhaps it is not always as good as it could be, but generally people are aware of how things fit together and what is relevant at local level, and by the time you get to SAGE, it is constituted as needed for national and international events. One of the important issues is to get our national labs working together. In the previous session we talked a lot about DSTL, AWE, the Met Office and Health Protection England as it is now and the Health Protection Agency as it was. Within the civil sector, the National Nuclear Lab has important expertise to offer, as well as that provided by AWE; the Health and Safety Executive’s health and safety labs have an enormous amount to offer, as indeed does NPL. Getting the collective might of the UK’s national labs together to co‑ordinate and share information could be an important improvement.
Chair
Dr Sykes, obviously getting the communications right is essential. We heard that consistently throughout the previous panel, and there are obvious improvements that can be made throughout the pipeline. What is your view about how well SAGEs and STACs communicate with personnel on the ground responding to an incident, but also with the media?
Dr Sykes
I do not know anything about communicating with people on the ground and that side of things. The bit I know about is the media side of things. The Government have a very difficult issue to deal with and essentially they go at it really well in getting together the right experts. They are all on call, as it were, to have them available as quickly as possible. Then they try to get that advice and feed it into different Government Departments, central Government and so on, so that everyone knows what information is to be shared through STAC and the others. There are a few issues with that. One is that, inevitably, when those scientists are brought into SAGE and so on, the chairs of SAGEs and the people running them are not explicitly giving them permission to go and do media work, or encouraging and supporting them to do so. As a result, you end up having a top level of scientific expertise carved off and lost to the public, because understandably they are having meetings but not sharing that information with anyone apart from Government. That in itself is not necessarily entirely problematic, but the information from them is not then coming out elsewhere. It would be fantastic if, as we have proposed, there was a press officer or, for example, someone with scientific expertise on SAGEs. They would be drawn from similar organisations to where the science is coming from and would go through the same process. In the case of flooding, it could be a senior press officer from the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology who is involved in the science and works on the issues. That individual gets involved in one of the panels and, as the information is coming through and a decision is being made, is thinking not only about how to advise Government but about how to advise the media and get the information out there. Journalists have to run the stories. If there are things the public need to know about, they will be running the story, and if they do not have top scientists to speak to and get information from, they will go to someone else who has less expertise, all the way down until eventually they are asking people on the street, “What do you think about the floods and what should be done about it?” If we have that information and expertise together, it can be used by more scientists from the organisations who are doing the work—the arm’s-length bodies and Government-run organisations where there are hundreds of thousands of scientists who are top specialists in these areas, often ones you will not find in industry, or even in academia and the universities in quite the same way. We can get more of those people trained and able to give out some of the background information: for example, providing mosquito experts during the Zika outbreak and experts on water systems during flooding. If there is no possibility to train up more people, they could at least get the information coming from SAGE that is not confidential and is not a matter of national security and share it with other third-party scientists, so that they can do the media interviews and explain to the public why a simple solution such as dredging may not be all that it sounds like it will be.
Chair
I am from Oxford and am very familiar with the dredging debate.
Dr Ion
Chair, I apologise that I did not fully answer the question you asked about the role of industry within SAGE. One matter to try to get across is the importance of nuclear engineering expertise and know-how, not just the scientific elements. In many instances, engineering is key to understanding how events might unfold in the case of a problem with a facility, and I suspect that would be true of chemical and biological facilities as well as nuclear facilities. It is not just about the science; it is about engineering barriers and general facility engineering and understanding the hazards and risks as events unfold. One of the benefits at Fukushima was having access to people who understood how those types of reactors in Japan worked and what the consequences were likely to be. Having access to industry in a SAGE environment, as well as academic expertise, is important and potentially could be improved.
Chair
That is very helpful.
Victoria Borwick
I want to turn to the Met Office involvement. How does the Met Office contribute to responding to CBRN incidents? You probably heard that this was briefly referred to earlier.
Phil Evans
It depends a little bit on exactly what we mean by CBRN. We do not particularly care about the nuances of that because we provide the advice and services we do whether or not it is the consequence of malicious intent. The definition does not matter to us, although clearly it does to others in a range of areas. Our pivotal expertise relevant to CBRN is in dispersion modelling. If there is an incident before malicious intent is established, we will start to run dispersion modelling and provide indications of plume extent for a range of users. We run operational services. As we have already touched on, we provide scientific advice, if relevant, through SAGE. Excluding our dispersion modelling expertise, weather events also have particular relevance to response and recovery. We have a network of civil contingency advisers who work across the country and interface with local responders, so we contribute in multiple ways.
Victoria Borwick
One of the things we have been talking about over and over again is the communication of science and what is happening. For example, in the volcanic ash incident there was not a direct life or death threat, but it had implications for people. How would you have demonstrated your involvement?
Phil Evans
That was an interesting issue for us as one of the world’s volcanic advisory centres. We went from having very little experience to having the most experience in a period of two weeks. It is a good example, because we were involved through multiple channels. We were sitting on COBRA; we were on the SAGE; we were also working on various groups established with industry, such as engine manufacturers. We were dealing with the Civil Aviation Authority and ICAO, the international organisation. Our civil contingency advisers, who are specialists not in particular areas of science but in high-impact events, whether that is weather or volcanic ash, were engaging with emergency responders—fire, police and ambulance.
Victoria Borwick
Is that expertise now catalogued or kept in some way such that it could be built on for another time?
Phil Evans
The Met Office is fortunate in some respects because there is a breadth to what we do. High-impact weather events happen very regularly, so to an extent we are always exercising our response capability and very regularly providing scientific advice and expertise to Government. We do that on a regular basis. Taking the particular example of volcanic ash—there have been two other minor incidents since Eyjafjallajökull—we have improved our capability and modelling, and established observing networks that better support that activity.
Victoria Borwick
That slightly leads on to my next question, which is about feeding into the dry runs. We heard briefly about your numerical atmospheric dispersion modelling environment, or NAME—another acronym of the day. Do you use that to feed into dry runs for emergencies or to inform training exercises? Are you involved in that mix at all?
Phil Evans
Yes, we are. We often provide weather scenarios for training events and the like. If required, we can run example dispersion models to inform events. Aside from the wider community exercises, we also run exercises internally to make sure that the various parts of the organisation join up and respond effectively.
Victoria Borwick
You think that there is sufficient recognition given and value added to what you are contributing to general knowledge.
Phil Evans
I think so. High-impact weather events happen on a fairly regular basis, so we are familiar in the broader terrain of emergency response, but there are a lot of other issues like volcanic ash and flooding, as opposed to heavy rainfall, where we are involved, so our expertise is quite widely recognised.
Victoria Borwick
We always go back to Michael Fish. Inevitably, as far as communication with the public is concerned, that is played and played again, which I am sure slightly downplays your current expertise. Is it possible that you could get it wrong again? How are you going to continue to reassure the public about your forecasting in incidents of CBRN, for example? They could be right or wrong.
Phil Evans
To echo comments made previously about the communication of science, effectively providing a forecast is a communication of science and is incredibly important. Since those days, we have invested an awful lot of effort in improving our ability there. We do not train our scientists in CBRN, because we do not have a public-facing role, but we train them in other areas and make them available to help communication. In terms of general forecast accuracy and quality, it has improved dramatically over the past decades, and we have been supported by significant investment from Government in super-computing to do that. As part and parcel of what we do, we track the general public’s level of trust in what we do. Why do we do that? Because if they do not trust what we say, they do not respond. Generally, trust levels for us are very high. Because there is always uncertainty in forecasting, there will probably be an occasion when we do not do as well as we should have done and it becomes quite visible, but that is just the nature of forecasting. We are thinking increasingly about how to communicate uncertainty in forecasts, whether or not they are weather forecasts, and to manage that, which is also relevant to CBRN.
Dr Ion
One thing that has certainly improved in the radiation and nuclear field since Fukushima is what is called joint agency modelling, or JAM, building together models like those run by the Met Office and Public Health England with other scientific models to help gain an understanding of how events might unfold. There is much better interplay between agencies and the models they may be using individually for their own purposes to try to get the best of all worlds.
Dr Sykes
The issue of uncertainty in communicating models and that kind of thing is one that will pop up time and time again. Earlier, I think Paddy gave the example of the cartoon that gave levels of radiation from different areas. A huge amount of work has gone into understanding and conveying risk, uncertainty and so on. Professor David Spiegelhalter is one of the people on the SAGE register. I am sure he would be too busy to be on it every time, but having someone with that kind of expertise involved with SAGE and organisations like that to think about how this complex information is conveyed, not just in terms of information to give journalists but how to package it up so that people understand it and take it, is key. As I think Paddy said, saying something is 1,000% higher sounds massively different when there is a very small absolute risk, so having that context is vital. Having someone involved in SAGE, STACs and so on who can convey that and work out how to put it together would be a really important step.
Jim Dowd
Dame Sue, many aspects of emergency response and planning are devolved. In your experience of the Fukushima SAGE did you feel you were acting in a UK role or just representing England?
Dr Ion
UK. Absolutely and definitely.
Jim Dowd
That doesn’t take much follow-up, does it? What general relationships do you have in SAGE with the devolved Administrations?
Dr Ion
With the devolved Administrations, with respect to SAGE, personally I haven’t, but my understanding is that depending on what is being run on SAGE as an exercise, or hopefully not in reality, the relevant devolved Administrations are present and communicated with. I think you would have to ask one of those who drive SAGE, like the CSA Foreign Office or one of those running the emergency exercises.
Jim Dowd
The Royal Society of Edinburgh is concerned that if there were several CBRN incidents, or a series emanating from an original event, we would not have adequate planning for that across the UK. Is that your view, or is that series of events so unlikely as to be not worth wasting time and effort on?
Dr Ion
They may be right in that events are not normally run in that way; they are run on the basis of a nuclear, chemical or biological issue. Certainly, there could be an examination of what would happen if a collective CBRN issue arose, to get the entities involved so that you can share the information and scientific advice that would go to them. In those, there are common entities in any event, like the Met Office, Public Health England, Transport and their counterparts in the devolved Administrations. There would be a lot of commonality across the piece. Pulling it all together to see the differences and what commonalities could be done better would be helpful.
Chris Green
Dr Ion, what are the research gaps in planning for and responding to CBRN incidents? I appreciate this might be sensitive information, but perhaps you can give as much detail as possible.
Dr Ion
It is not a research gap per se in terms of response, because until it happens you do not know what you have got. It is more about having the national capability to be up to speed at cutting-edge level in most aspects of chemical, biological and nuclear hazard and having an expertise base of subject-matter experts able to give you advice at the time on that particular issue. It is important that the UK maintains the capability to train subject-matter experts. In the nuclear world, many of the subject-matter experts available for Fukushima had their genesis in research 20 or 30 years ago when we had much bigger national labs in that area, so one of the things we need to be careful about going forward is not to diminish that national capability so that you actually can have subject-matter experts.
Chris Green
On having a subject-matter expert, if you have an industry in that area you develop the expertise, which can then be applied elsewhere.
Dr Ion
Correct.
Chris Green
If you do not have the industry in the first place, it is very difficult to have home-grown expertise.
Dr Ion
That’s right, and it is not just direct industry like, say, the generation industry; it is everything that used to go around that—the fuel cycle facilities, fuel manufacturing, reprocessing and recycling, and waste management activities. It is having the full life-cycle capability and the ability to understand and respond, not just to what is going on in the UK but generally. Those sorts of incidents are trans-national issues, so the ability to comment on something happening elsewhere is as important as something happening here in the UK.
Chris Green
An organisation dealing with nuclear materials will have to plan seriously how it would deal with an accident in the UK. Therefore, if there is some kind of attack, many of the same processes would be applied as well.
Dr Ion
Yes, but maintaining capability to understand things we may not have here in the UK but that exist elsewhere, in terms of reactor types and systems, is also important. We may not deploy them here. We did not deploy BWRs here until Hitachi started its journey with BWRs at Wylfa and Oldbury. It was the BWR that gave rise to the issue at Fukushima, so having people who understood BWRs, even though we had never deployed one here at that time, was important. Similarly, whatever the outcome on 23 June, it is really important that the UK remains involved in European projects in the area of severe accident research. All of them have acronyms, as they always do, like SARNET, ERMSAR, the European review meetings on severe accident research, and SAFEST, or severe accident facilities for Europe safety targets. They all have the usual acronyms, but the bottom line is that it is important for the UK to have people who are involved in those and understand how things are evolving in our closest neighbours, irrespective of what we do on 23 June.
Phil Evans
This is very much about our area of activity and expertise, which is around dispersion modelling. Although there is not a particular area of research that I would say is lacking and where significant improvements could be made if we invested in it, there are some potential issues about the availability of people with the right skills and expertise. We have to do an awful lot of in-house training for people who work in this area. It is quite demanding. Some of these scientists are world leading in their own right, but they also have to act in quite a high-pressure operational environment. We have to work quite hard to train people up. It is a broader point about capability.
Dr Ion
Because it is not just about the science base but about the applications and the understanding of them, the research sponsorship would not necessarily fall within the preserve of the research councils; it would definitely fall within the preserve of the Departments of State that have the relevant relationships with their national lab or agencies. The knowledge and understanding do not exist in a vacuum; they are there when you need them, but in order for them to be there you have to invest in them going forward.
Chris Green
As a particular example of that, ADS highlighted that more research needs to be done on decontamination and showering. Do you see a problem there and that the Government need to ensure that money is available for that research?
Dr Ion
Certainly, review and examination of whether we have thought sufficiently about a post-event clean-up and decontamination is a fair challenge—planning for that and what we would do with it, and the research that might be needed to underpin it further. Decontamination and clean-up may have a significant time horizon, so a lot of social science and public communication issues would be associated with that, as well as the basics of how you decontaminate anybody who may have been contaminated, or land or assets.
Carol Monaghan
The Science Media Centre says that the Government have a “huge” role to play during a CBRN emergency, and that “the public will get most of their information about the crisis from the mass media. If they are not hearing from scientific experts then this is a missed opportunity.” Dr Sykes, have the Government communicated well during CBRN events such as Fukushima?
Dr Sykes
Each individual case has to be taken separately, and there have been some really good examples and some less good ones. For example, during swine flu Liam Donaldson was giving briefings every week—almost every couple of days—and every time he put packages of information together on what SAGE were doing, it was shared with lots of people. Journalists had lots of opportunities to speak to experts and the information was coming out. It did not necessarily happen straight away and it took a little while to get going, but because it was an issue that went on for so long everyone was learning as the process happened. That was one example where it went very well, and Public Health England said that they are going to do the same, when they can; they will try to share information with us and the third-party experts we work with, for example. When it comes to things such as Fukushima, it is more difficult. I believe the Government were basically asking the experts to advise them as a priority, and not to think about advising the public. The problem with that was that while it makes perfect sense for Government to have all that advice so that they know what to do, where to put resources and everything else, the public get their information from the media. Estelle Morris said that she learned more about nuclear during the Fukushima incident than she ever did at school.
Carol Monaghan
That will be the teachers.
Dr Sykes
In the UK, there was something known as the Fukushima bounce where support for nuclear power went up as a result, whereas in other countries it was going down because the media were getting even less evidence into their stories and the public were being misinformed. In Fukushima, we were relying very heavily on people like Paddy Regan. There were about 40 or 50 scientists we were working with day in, day out to try to get their voices heard, but there was not as much information coming out from Government Departments as we would have hoped, and hopefully that is something we can learn from.
Carol Monaghan
With that in mind, do scientists need to be supported during incidents so that they can communicate well?
Dr Sykes
There are different aspects to that. There are scientists who are fundamentally within Whitehall, the chief scientific adviser and so on. Their conversations need to be totally behind closed doors and they are completely Government-owned, as it were. That is fine. But there are also scientists at all the arm’s-length or Government-run bodies who have a wealth of expertise. It is quite a complicated process and depends on each organisation and how it chooses to operate, but what normally happens is that they tend to decide the message they need to get out there and they work out what they want to say, and then they might train up one person, or just a handful of people. Inevitably, if you have an incident such as Ebola, swine flu or Fukushima, where it is rolling on for days, weeks and months, you cannot fill all the media with just a handful of people. It is 24‑hour rolling news; you need experts all the time. We get Sky on the phone and every single hour they want a new expert to talk about the same issue, what is developing and what is going on here and there; they are always looking for a new angle. If you can get scientists at arm’s length or Government-run bodies to talk about the background issues, such as the difference between millisieverts and microsieverts and the different types of mosquito that could be transmitting Zika—not necessarily talking about the planning or things like that; there can certainly be things that are off limits—and filling the vacuum with all that information, the public will be much better served. The people running SAGE and so on could get their experts together and say, “Look, you are the top experts. There are certain things you can’t talk about because it is a matter of national security, but for everything else you have permission to speak. We’re encouraging you to speak to the media because you are the key people.” If they cannot do that—or as well as doing that—they could be getting the information out to the next layer of scientists who are key people, to whom journalists will be going anyway. Journalists will have to run the story; their editors will be pushing them to do it. They are not just going to say, “Well, the Government’s not saying anything.” It will take time. When SAGE or COBRA is pulled together, they work as fast as they can to get their decisions made, but for the first couple of days there will be no information coming out. One key example was polonium 210 when the issue was what the poison was. What caused the issue? At the very beginning, it was considered to be thallium, so we had experts who could talk about it and say, “Well if it is thallium, and we don’t know that it is, it will mean this, that and so on.” Then it was thought that it might be radioactive thallium, which apparently has different properties, so they talked about that. Having experts talk about the background issues makes it so much better than the air waves being filled with campaigners, or people who do not know what they are talking about but just want to use it as an opportunity to bring up their pet issues, or the vox pop—the person on the street who is concerned about an issue but does not have any background knowledge and is just worried about it. If that reverberates and reverberates, everyone suffers.
Carol Monaghan
Dr Ion, first, were you approached during the Fukushima incident to speak, and, secondly, did you feel comfortable speaking to the press while also providing Government advice through SAGE?
Dr Ion
For the first three or four days of SAGE, my advice was provided down a mobile phone from the ski slopes because that’s the way it worked; Sir John Beddington wanted access to the people he wanted access to, irrespective of where they happened to be on the globe at the time. As far as speaking to the press was concerned, the advice we got at the time was, “Provided you do not relate what you are saying to SAGE, and you are giving your professional opinion, please respond to what the media are asking for”; otherwise, if you have taken out those the media know to be your top experts and there is radio silence, suspicion builds. It is possible to give dispassionate advice and talk to the media without compromising your position on SAGE, and in the post-Fukushima era, talking to print journalists or radio—I did not do TV for Fukushima but I have for other nuclear incidents—it was possible to do that.
Carol Monaghan
Dr Sykes, you recommended that SAGE has an independent press officer. Do you think they would have expertise in science, journalism or possibly both?
Dr Sykes
It would have to be a science—health and environment—press officer, and they have expertise in understanding the media and what they need and how they operate and what will and will not work for them, and in understanding the needs of scientists and how they operate and being able to help them through it. There are lots of examples of press officers who would be great at doing this kind of thing. Barnaby Smith from the CEH during flooding would have been fantastic. He has spent umpteen years working with all the experts there talking about the issues and understanding them. He knows who the scientists are and can guide everyone through it, and he knows what is likely to crop up. You could have a press officer from one of the national academies, say Bill Hartnett from the Royal Society, or someone from the funding organisations like Carmel Turner, chief press officer at the MRC. They are all press officers who understand the scientific issues and how the media work. They understand that if you say one thing it will be reported in one way, and if you say it in a different way and do not give the caveats, limitations and subtleties and the relative risks as well as absolute risks, it will be misreported. If there is someone thinking about the media at the same time as lots of people are thinking about how to advise Government, the information will get out in a much better way. Obviously, the SMC would be happy to step in.
Carol Monaghan
Dr Ion, do you think it would have been useful to have such a press officer during the Fukushima incident?
Dr Ion
Maybe, but I think a pretty good job was done at the time of Fukushima, both by the SAGE advice to Government and by the independent scientists, some of whom sat on SAGE and some of whom did not. They gave accurate information on a very rapid basis to the media. Our Prime Minister was able to give advice to the embassy in Japan not to evacuate anybody from Japan who was a UK national. Our ambassador stood in front of Japanese television and said he was staying put and so was his family, because it was safe to do so. That was a huge thing. Some other nations did not take the scientific advice they were given, and evacuated, although the scientific advice, whether it was in France, the United States or here, was common; it was that there was no need to evacuate.
Carol Monaghan
You think that having a proper scientist providing this advice gives it more credibility and currency.
Dr Ion
Yes. The chief scientific adviser of the day, Sir John Beddington, was confident that the advice he had been given by the collective was correct and the right thing to do, and passed it on to COBRA, which then passed it out through the Foreign Office to our nationals based overseas. It also meant that here the reaction to Fukushima was very different from, say, the reaction in Germany. Most people in the UK could understand that tsunamis and earthquakes are not things that, thankfully, we see every day, and that that had been the trigger, so we would not see that sort of situation here in the UK. Their reaction to nuclear power generally was not extreme, and, as Ed indicated, it showed the bounce that it did.
Dr Sykes
Sue is someone who has done lots of media work and is very confident and knows her way around things. Some of the scientists being brought into SAGE are not as aware. We know of scientists who said they felt they could not speak to the media because they had signed the confidentiality provision of the Official Secrets Act and so on and were worried about what they could and could not say. They would rather not say anything in case they got themselves into trouble inadvertently. While there were some really good aspects, more could be done. Certainly, at the SMC we had journalists coming to us saying, “We’re not getting some of the information we need; we could get more. We know that more information was coming out during swine flu, so perhaps there would be a way to do that.” Having an extra press officer to view that side of things could help change the culture of everything in terms of thinking about what to do with the media and the public as well as the Government.
Chair
You have compared swine flu with Fukushima. I know the SMC has views about Ebola as well. Do you think that there are differences in the way various Departments respond? Is it departmental culture, or is it something else?
Dr Sykes
Yes, there is definitely difference between departmental cultures. There is massive difference between various arm’s-length bodies and so on. Depending on the individuals you speak to, you get different responses. If there was a culture shift, where it was written down somewhere that, where possible, scientists should have explicit permission to speak and should be encouraged and supported, and helped through it so that the more nervous ones who are concerned about saying the wrong thing have support and advice, and there was someone to think about how to get that information out to the next tier of people, it would circumvent some of the more individual issues Departments might have. Sometimes you have what we class as anti‑press officers who have come from a sector where they have been trained almost to keep stuff out of the news, and it is about saying no to everything. If you end up having those in certain places, it puts the plug on everything, and everything becomes extremely difficult. It is part of the culture; if you have a scientist who has to make a statement, they have to get it checked by, say, their departmental press officer, and that departmental press officer has to get it checked by the senior departmental press officer and so on, and sometimes it goes three or four steps up to central Government. When journalists are working in a time span where they need the answer in 40 minutes or an hour, because they have to go to print and that is when the next bulletin goes out, it may not even be that the Government are stopping the information coming out, but they are not working in a timeframe that would enable the media to work with it, so in effect they are not getting the information out there. All we are asking for is a tweak to the system and a bit of a nod to thinking about the media and having that thought. That is why we think that having someone just to push and prod and having a few of these things set down in writing, effectively, to say that this is what they should be doing could help encourage that.
Chair
Dr Sykes, I’ve got your key recommendation. Mr Evans, what would be your key recommendation to the Committee?
Phil Evans
It was not a key recommendation. I was just going to emphasise a point in that discussion. If you see the communications role in events like this as SAGE or others synthesising pieces of information that may come from all sorts of organisations into a common, coherent view and then communicating it in a common, coherent way, making sure there are no vacuums in the sense the media are not going to other sources, you get a consistent message. If you do not get a consistent message—this has come out in research to do with weather events—but you get inconsistency and incoherence, pretty much immediately the general public lose trust in what is being said. If you want the public to respond, lack of trust inhibits response. There is a very practical element to this.
Chair
Do you have a message to leave with the Committee?
Phil Evans
I do not know about the particular mechanisms, but I think a culture change is the important thing. SAGE and others recognise the importance of communicating skilfully, and that it is a valuable and important skillset.
Chair
Dr Ion, it does not have to be about communication. Is there a key part of the system that you think needs improvement?
Dr Ion
One thing that happened after Fukushima was the communications initiative of the Nuclear Industry Council that existed at the time—it has not sat in this Parliament—and a review of how the collective civil side communicates with the rest of the world, whether it be industry, the supply chain, the National Nuclear Lab or key academic enterprises, but it was mainly about nuclear power. There is no reason why that sort of initiative could not be broadened to look at how we would approach better public communications appropriate to emergencies of a CBRN nature, and to run the communications side of CBRN within SAGE exercises to look specifically at how you would communicate that particular event had it been real.
Chair
I thank all of you for the time you have taken, especially for your patience at the beginning while we were voting. You have been very kind. It has been a very insightful afternoon and a good way for us to kick off this inquiry. We might have a few questions to follow up, not least so that we can make sure we get all our acronyms right. With that, I bring this session to a close. Oral evidence: Science in emergencies: CBRN, HC 163 21