The EU is wrong to scrap the chief science role when expert advice is needed on the challenges facing us in energy, food and climate, argue two science advocates

So Jean-Claude Juncker, the new president of the European Commission, has scrapped the role of chief scientific adviser.

No one will now bring scientific scrutiny to the political decisions of the Commission, the body at the heart of European policy-making that affects half a billion citizens across 28 nations. The most senior European regulators and law-makers no longer have a link to the evidence base of the European research community.

What Juncker announced was the termination of the Bureau of European Policy Advisers, which provided the commission’s president, commissioners and directors-general with strategic advice. The chief scientific adviser role was based within this body. The replacement body Juncker proposes – the European Political Strategy Centre – does not include a similar science post.

The chief scientific adviser, working with scant resources and a lack of clarity, has only ever been a single thread rather than the many ropes that were needed. But the creation of the role was a recognition by policy-makers that science and evidence are tools for making better, more accountable policies. It was an aspiration, one which followed a series of directives that made little sense and were full of unintended consequences.


Generosity of spirit

Our science advocacy group Sense About Science began pushing for this role at the start of 2009, following discussions with environment commissioner Janez Potočnik’s team how longer-term improvements in scientific input could be made and how to mistakes could be caught before they became policy – for example the commission’s Physical Agents Directive 2008, which inadvertently threatened the use of MRI scanners vital to modern medicine in its attempt to set occupational limits on exposure to electromagnetic fields.

In 2010, Commission president José Manuel Barroso announced the creation of the role and the first chief scientific adviser took up the job in January 2012.

Yes, next to other big influences in European policy-making – such as the formidable resources of commercial public affairs activity – the adviser role has been tiny. When the incumbent, Anne Glover, became the first and possibly only adviser, she was surprised to find that her team was smaller than the one she had when she was chief scientific adviser for Scotland.

However, she has said the support and generosity of spirit shown by the research communities across Europe has made her role workable, if still difficult. In fact, Glover inspired that generosity, so much so that after just three years the research world came to believe that contributing to European policy-making was part of their responsibilities.

In the face of European policy challenges in energy, food production, pest and disease control and much else, this was a huge step forward. What a wasteful and regrettable situation that the new commission has now taken this step backwards.