Sir Patrick Vallance says: ’Science impacts every part of our lives, so scientists should be there at the table, all the time’

Britain’s civil service is suffering from a serious lack of scientific talent that threatens its ability to compete with nations such as China. That is the stark view of the government’s own chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance.

In a rare interview, Vallance said a dearth of scientists and engineers in government posed major problems for the nation as it attempts to deal with the threats of climate change, an ageing population and tightened national security.

Vallance is backing a major push inside the civil service to boost numbers of science and engineering graduates. “This is the one thing in my tenure that I want to get fixed,” he said.

Appointed to his current post two years ago, Vallance said he had found there was a massive weighting of individuals who had backgrounds and degrees in arts, humanities, and economics inside government. By contrast, those who were trained in science or engineering were in a distinct minority.

“Consider the civil service faststream scheme, which encourages the brightest young people to become senior civil servants,” said Vallance. “Out of 400 of those who were accepted to the scheme in 2017-18 only around 40 had degrees in science and engineering. That is unacceptably low. We have to get that up to around 200 out of 400 if we are going to be capable of dealing with the issues of the 21st century and affect ways of thinking across Whitehall.

“If you look at a country such as China, you find its government is full of individuals who understand science and technology. That is not the case with Britain. So it is essential that we put things right.”

His call for increased numbers of scientists in government was also stressed in a recent report published by his office, Realising our Ambition Through Science. In addition, Dominic Cummings – Boris Johnson’s chief adviser – earlier this month published a blog dismissing those with English degrees from Oxford and Cambridge as potentially useful civil servants and instead pressed the case for recruiting young mathematicians, physicists and data analysts. “What Dominic Cummings is saying is that the civil service needs more scientists and engineers, and I agree with that,” said Vallance.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Dominic Cummings. Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA

Before taking up his government post, Vallance was professor of medicine at University College London and an expert on diseases of blood vessels. He was later president of research and development at GlaxoSmithKline from 2012 until 2017.

To highlight the importance of scientific expertise in government, Vallance pointed to decisions that will have to be made about national infrastructure in order to meets Britain’s pledge to be a net-zero emitter of greenhouse gases by 2050.

“We will have to remove domestic heating from the gas grid, find ways of designing carbon-free transport systems in towns, and – at the same time – find ways to understand the reams of data that will be generated by these programmes and use that data to inform and improve future actions to combat climate change. We will need scientists and engineers to help us do that.”

However, in some government departments, scientists are still not being involved when important policy decisions are being discussed, because it is thought there are no scientific issues. “That might have been excusable decades ago, but science impacts every part of our lives today, so scientists should be there – at the table – all the time,” said Vallance.

Among those departments with poor levels of scientific investment or representation, Vallance said, were housing, local government, environment, farming and rural affairs, and the Home Office. All had suffered significant reductions in their science budgets in recent years. “We need to put that right,” he said.

However, Vallance stressed that he was not arguing that science should dominate considerations of the problems that lie ahead. “We need a mix of all types of talent. However, at present science is seriously under-represented and that needs to be put right. We are working on the problem and I am hopeful we can put things right in the near future. The crucial point is that problem has been recognised and I believe there is a lot of enthusiasm to get it fixed.”