Clashes between the government and its expert advisers

In the United Kingdom, experts advise and government ministers make policy with no obligation to accept their experts’ advice. For example, ministers have often declined to accept expert advice to raise alcohol taxes as a way of reducing problem drinking.1 The recent sacking of Professor David Nutt from the chairmanship of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) occurred because a minister rejected the recommendations of an expert adviser who continued publicly to express a view that was contrary to government policy.

The question of how science should be used to formulate government policy has been a problem on many occasions, in the UK and elsewhere. Disagreements between government and experts on the risks of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) from eating beef in the late 1990s prompted the reformulation of rules on the use of scientific evidence in developing policy. In the BSE affair, ministers discounted expert advice that the disease in cows might spread to humans, and the official BSE Inquiry subsequently recommended that the advice and the reasoning of expert advisory committees should be open and transparent.2

The circumstances leading up to the sacking of Professor Nutt can …