Narrow and unbalanced Sage leaves the Government in a lockdown bind
Sage is No10’s main knowledge source in a crisis. But its organisation ensures that ministers get a narrow and unbalanced view
Upon taking office, the Health Secretary, Sajid Javid, said that “we have to take a broad and balanced view” of pandemic policy. He ruled out Covid status certification as a condition of venue entry. Promising certainty and irreversibility, he said: “Make no mistake: the restrictions on our freedoms must come to an end.” Face coverings would no longer be a legal requirement in any setting, including public transport.
And yet by July 12, the new Health Secretary was encouraging businesses to use certification, and telling us we would be expected to wear face coverings. We know his original intent but we must ask why he changed his plans.
A broad view takes in all the considerations, and a balanced view knows how to weigh them. There are trade-offs between economic issues, such as unemployment, and health issues, such as Covid transmission rates. There are trade-offs between non-Covid health issues, such as cancer screening rates, and health issues, such as Covid hospitalisations. Mr Javid rightly asked: “What are the challenges faced by ministers in liberal democracies that make it hard for them to properly weigh up trade-offs?”
Politicians need access to a broad and balanced view of events, especially in the most urgent moments of crisis. The Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) is No10’s main knowledge source in a crisis. Unfortunately, the organisation of Sage ensures that the Government will get a narrow and unbalanced view, with trade-offs absent.
The trouble begins with Sage’s “role” of providing the Government with “unified scientific advice on all the key issues, based on the body of scientific evidence presented by its expert participants”. If “scientific” advice is “unified” it cannot be broad and balanced. It is “unified” only if one view prevails. Science is about inquiry and the contestation of ideas, not the imposition of orthodoxy. In What is Science?, the physicist Richard Feynman said: “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.” So, Sage ought to have a team assigned the task of challenging as strongly as possible the results of the rest of the group.
The narrow governance structure of Sage reinforces the tendency towards uniformity and orthodoxy. The power to select Sage members is narrow. Currently, it rests on two people: the Government’s Chief Medical Officer, Prof Chris Whitty, and its Chief Scientific Adviser, Patrick Vallance. Such superintendence encourages uniformity of opinion and disciplinary narrowness.
It’s not that Vallance and Whitty are bad actors. They are serious figures with illustrious careers. But they must make judgments when selecting Sage members, and their illustrious careers can give them no immunity from the partiality of all human judgment. Each of us has a point of view, and all points of view are imperfect and incomplete. Requiring Sage members to be confirmed by Parliament could create broad democratic governance and help to ensure that the widest possible variety of interests and perspectives would be represented in Sage.
Sage has been criticised for disciplinary narrowness, including the neglect of economics and education. Disciplinary narrowness can produce blind spots. Standard epidemiological models, for example, neglect the ways people respond to the risk of infection. Interventions that make interactions safer can be undermined by people then interacting more. Sage needs a broader set of represented disciplines.
These problems matter because Sage has an effective monopoly on the provision of scientific advice to the Government. If Sage were competing in a free market of ideas, we might be able to rely on rivalry among experts to create the broad and balanced view the Government needs. But Sage is a part of the Government, and it cannot be a competitor in the open marketplace. It could be required to simulate a market by forming three multidisciplinary expert teams that would compete against each other. Such a reorganisation would return Sage to its roots. When it was first activated in 2009, it “reviewed modelling from three independent groups of mathematical modellers”, which helped it to “communicate the uncertainties, particularly from the mathematical modelling, to ministers”.
The Health Secretary is a deep thinker who has studied pandemic policy. Now, he will have seen how deeply institutions steer policymaking. If he is willing to adopt reforms that follow the study of human action in the field of expert advice, Mr Javid could swiftly make Sage the source of broad and balanced wisdom we desperately need.