Emmeline Ledgerwood celebrates the 80th anniversary of the establishment of the Parliamentary and Scientific Committee and its work to strengthen Parliament’s scrutiny of science.
Today marks 80 years since the Parliamentary & Scientific Committee (P&SC), Westminster’s first all-party parliamentary group (APPG), was formally constituted on 8 November 1939. Throughout its history the P&SC has focused on strengthening Parliament’s ability to understand and debate the scientific and technical issues that come before it, with P&SC members campaigning for the establishment of the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee and the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology.
The P&SC was based on an earlier Parliamentary Science Committee that had been active during the inter-war years through the efforts of members of the British Science Guild and the Association of Scientific Workers. As with its predecessor, the P&SC aimed to bring representatives from Parliament, learned societies, research associations, academia and industry together, the goal being to “accumulate and distribute to its members such information concerning the work of scientific workers” and to hold periodic meetings “addressed by acknowledged leaders of scientific thought.”[1] The P&SC programme of meetings and visits to scientific research establishments stimulated dialogue among members, while P&SC members with specialist knowledge contributed information to a limited ‘Parliamentary Information Service’ for parliamentarians.[2]
In the 1960s science policy and national expenditure on ambitious technological programmes moved up the agenda of party politics. In 1963 Harold Wilson campaigned on a promise to modernise Britain through the “white heat” of a scientific revolution, but contemporary observers saw, “little evidence that Parliament is capable of intelligent and sustained consideration of this escalating budget [on science] and its social and political ramifications.”[3]
For the P&SC two distinct goals emerged in 1964: “the need for improved methods by which Members of Parliament can quickly get information from scientists about matters likely to be raised in Parliament”, and improving “the existing machinery to ensure that Parliament can establish more effective control over scientific and technological policy.” [4]
To achieve that second goal, the P&SC embarked on a campaign that was part of the wider movement for parliamentary reform that characterised the early 1960s. Both at Westminster and beyond, P&SC members argued the case for a specialist select committee on “scientific policy”.[5]
Initial progress came with the appointment at the end of 1965 of an Estimates Committee sub-committee on Technological and Scientific Affairs, but by the end of 1966 Richard Crossman, Leader of the House, announced the creation of two new select committees, one of which was a specialist subject committee on science and technology.
Many of the new committee’s members (first appointed 25 January 1967) were members of the P&SC, and its first chairman—Arthur Palmer—had been a P&SC officer since the 1940s. MPs now had the power to call witnesses and scrutinise science policy across a wide range of government departments. Committee reports published during the 1970s shed light on some of the issues of the day, such as defence research, the reorganisation of the nuclear power industry, population growth, seabed engineering and scientific research in British universities.
However, the 1979 reorganisation of the Commons select committee system along departmental lines saw the disappearance of the Science and Technology Committee (due to the absence of a separate government department for science). In its place came a new Select Committee on Education, Science and Arts. P&SC members in the Lords responded by proposing the establishment of a Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology, the members of which were duly appointed in January 1980.
Throughout the 1980s the Commons Select Committee on Education, Science and Arts was occupied with education matters. Its chairman (and P&SC member) Sir William van Straubenzee was aware of the committee’s failings regarding science and actively sought support from the P&SC chairman in lobbying for the reinstatement of a specialist committee on science and technology.[6] However it was not until the start of the 1992-1997 Parliament that its reinstatement was realised following the creation of a new government departmental body called the Office of Science and Technology.
This 1980s hiatus in the select committee’s work spurred a small group of P&SC members—Sir Ian Lloyd, Sir Gerard Vaughan and Sir Trevor Skeet—to keep working on the first of the 1964 goals, improving MPs’ access to information from scientists. Their idea was to set up a unit along the lines of the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) that had served the US Congress since 1972. Lloyd became the torch-bearer for the campaign, putting the suggestion to the Prime Minister in April 1985, and again raising the concept during a debate on science in June 1985, but Margaret Thatcher refused to commit funding to such a venture.
In the spirit of the 1980s, when private enterprise was encouraged as an alternative to state provision of services, Lloyd instead turned to P&SC members for support in setting up a ‘demonstrator’ technology assessment office.[7] Financial donations, the provision of office space and scientists’ contributions to published briefings meant that the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST) could begin operating in April 1989. Over the next decade Lloyd went on to successfully make a case for parliamentary support for POST so that by 2001 it was granted permanent funding.[8]
The activities of P&SC members thus contributed to the establishment of both the select committee and POST within the institution of Parliament. While the fate of the Commons select committee was bound up with decisions made by the executive, backbench P&SC members from the 1960s to the 1990s kept the concept alive by tabling amendments and early day motions, asking questions of Ministers, raising the issue in debates and submitting evidence to inquiries. When it came to POST, the determination of a handful of P&SC officers was instrumental in securing its position alongside the Science and Technology Committee as one of the institutional mechanisms that now support MPs in their scrutiny of science.
Emmeline Ledgerwood is undertaking an AHRC collaborative PhD with the British Library and the University of Leicester, using oral history to explore how privatisation policies of the 1980s and 1990s affected government research establishments and the scientists who worked in them. Emmeline has researched Conservative party membership through oral history and also works with the History of Parliament on their oral history project. Follow her on Twitter: @EmmeLedgerwood
References
[1] A. G. Church, ‘A Parliamentary Science Committee’, Nature, (26 Oct. 1929), pp.641-643.
[2] Christopher Powell and Arthur Butler, Parliamentary and Scientific Committee: The first forty years 1939-79 (Croom Helm, 1980).
[3] David Edgerton, ‘The ‘White Heat’ revisited: the British government and technology in the 1960s’, Twentieth Century British History, 7, no.1 (1996), pp.53–82 (p.79); S. A. Walkland and N. J. Vig, ‘Parliament, science and technology’, Technology and Society, 4, no.1 (1967), pp.40–45 (p.40).
[4] Select Committee on Procedure, Fourth Report 1964-65 (29 Jul. 1965), p.143 and p.131.
[5] A. Albu, ‘The Member of Parliament, the executive and scientific policy’, Minerva, 2, no. 1 (1963), pp.1–20.
[6] Minutes of P&SC Steering Group meeting, 28 Apr. 1987. Papers of Ernest Shackleton, S/573, Parliamentary Archives.
[7] The current term for such an office is a legislative science and technology advisory body.
[8] Information Committee, The Future of the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology, First Report 1999-2000 (17 Jul. 2000).