• Declaring an interest

I’m not a scientist. However, like many people, I’m increasingly aware of the role that science plays in matters of national importance. Nowhere recently was this more dramatically shown than during the pandemic. For reasons I’ll look at in a moment, this may have done science a disservice.

It would appear that three worrying things are happening to both the number and the quality of published scientific work.

• Quantity v quality

A larger number of universities, and thus of students, has led to more academics and an ever-increasing demand for academic worth to be measured by the volume of papers published.

Quantity is a lot easier to measure than quality, in the same way that the number of likes on a Facebook post can easily be counted but the worth of its content cannot. One way academia has tried to address this is with what’s called the h-index which refers to how often the paper is cited.

Unfortunately, this replaces one imprecision with another. The index pays little attention to whether the citations are favourable or dismissive. Also, some “busier” scientific areas are likely to result in more citations than quieter ones, as perhaps are papers which are multi-authored.

The net result would seem to be the same amount of top-quality research being produced but an increasing number of less worthy publications appearing as well.

• A little knowledge

This would be fine were the readership to be restricted to people (i.e. scientists) who knew what they were talking about.

In fact, people like me can now access many of these works immediately and for free online. I looked at some when writing about Covid and rapidly realised I was out of my depth. Fortunately, I have scientific friends who could help translate.

However, a well-sounding phrase in the eye-catching first or last paragraph, or in the even more eye-catching headline, might find its way into the public domain, even though the author had failed to grasp its significance or veracity.

• Jargon for a reason

All technical disciplines, from civil engineering to town planning and from medicine to law, have their own jargon. This is both convenient and necessary and conveys a precise meaning to the initiated. The uninitiated, however, may jump to utterly the wrong conclusion.

When dealing with public rights of way, for instance, the seemingly clear-cut term “Definitive Map Order” does not, as one might reasonably assume, always order that the path be added to the definitive map. When talking about something like virus infection rates, any misunderstandings can lead to fallacies on an international scale.

An analogy might be someone who speaks perfect English sitting down to play a rubber of bridge for the first time. Every word of the bidding will be clear but the actual meaning will not. Anyone who tries to put a literal interpretation on “three no trumps” or “four hearts” will be in for a nasty surprise, as will anyone to whom they try to explain the game based on this false apprehension.

We therefore have more academic papers of indifferent quality and more people with indifferent knowledge now accessing and interpreting them. To that must be added the increasing use of AI.

• The new player

An increasing number of papers are now wholly or partly authored by AI. While a good academic can tell the difference between a good paper and a bad one, discerning which was the work of a human and which of a bot is becoming increasingly hard.

If quality can be assessed, one might think that provenance doesn’t matter. However, this is to ignore AI’s contribution to increasing the number of papers published, some of which may be designed more for personal than scientific advancement.

Another problem is the fact that AI is now feeding off itself. Your average bot is now wiser than it was but is still capable of misunderstanding the nuances of technical language. These mis-readings then get repeated, and become learned and re-learned by other bots and so become part of the collective landscape.

The more artfully they’re written, the more they’re likely to be cited by non-expert humans and thus find their way by this additional route into the public domain.

• “The best science”

All this might sound elitist. I suppose it is, although I’m not part of the elite I’m seeking to defend. There’s a vital role to be played by reputable scientific explainers who provide clear insights for the lay reader into technical areas from statistics to epidemiology. However, science as a whole risks being slightly devalued by these three trends.

I mentioned earlier that scientists were thrust into the limelight by the pandemic. BoJo wheeled out Chris Whitty and the rest at the press briefings, partly to lend gravitas to his own decisions. “Follow the best science” (whatever that was, exactly) became the watchword. The inference was that, by using scientists to this unprecedented extent to back up expedient judgments, some of the certainty and expertise would rub off on the politicians.

• Two different world-views

The trouble is that scientists and politicians look at the world in different ways. A politician appears to deal in certainty and yet is constantly assailed by doubt as the complexities and sheer impossibility of achieving a certain result become clearer.

A scientist, on the other hand, deals in doubt and tries, through various experiments and models, to arrive at the best possible explanation of the issue. This may look like certainty, and we may want it to be. However it’s merely the best version of the truth we have right now.

Heliocentrism is now widely regarded as something that’s proved. However, it’s only a model that has, so far, survived the scrutiny that current methods of observation and measurement can apply. For centuries before, the idea that everything revolved around the earth held sway. This was impeccably logical given the methods then available to observe it. Expressing doubt about a prevailing view rarely gives the doubter an easy ride – just ask Galileo.

During the pandemic, we all wanted certainty. Who better to provide this, we were invited to believe, than the scientists? In a way, few people would have been worse. By being forced to air simple explanations of complex and evolving issues on prime-time TV, and with the conclusions translated into the pseudo-certainty of the politicians, they became tarnished with ineffectuality.

• Over-exposure

For one thing, these damned boffins kept changing their minds, or admitting to doubt, or citing factors beyond their knowledge or control. That wasn’t what we wanted to hear. Clear Churchillian messages were needed – no matter that these were often rapidly proved to be over-simplistic or plain wrong. There’d soon be another one along to replace it. “I can do better than that”, people were saying.

Through being over-exposed, expertise was brought into disrepute, often by the very politicians who were employing it. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that only one British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, had a science degree. The two approaches to the world are largely incompatible.

• Proving the proof (1)

Vaccine denial and climate change are two ways by which the threads of indifferent science, misinterpretation and – increasingly – AI and bad actors have perverted our view of what certainty is, and is not.

“I want to see the proof of vaccine safety before I’ll use it”, someone said to me during the pandemic. I asked if they were a scientist. They weren’t. I respectfully suggested that they wouldn’t know what specific scientific proof looked like.

“How will you decide, then?” they asked. It was a fair question.

I said that, being inexpert, I had to trust the overwhelming evidence of hundreds or thousands pieces of peer-reviewed research, filtered to me through organisations I had to believe did not exist merely to kill me. I was aware of the doubt but had no way, except for through probability, that I could manage it.

That this roll-out and the accompanying message was done at break-neck speed and yet proved to be substantially correct was probably the greatest result from the pandemic.

• Proving the proof (2)

Exactly the same logic can be applied to climate change. This is trickier than Covid as it’s happening very slowly and individual incidents like heatwaves can always be ascribed to some other cause. If someone asks me to prove conclusively that this is caused by human activity I reply (a) I’m not qualified to say and (b) no one can.

What I can do, though, is count. From all measures I’ve seen, over 95% of scientists who have expertise in the field feel that human activity is to a greater or lesser extent causing climatic change. I’m not interested in what other journalists, or newspapers, or non-expert scientists, or a social-media keyboard warrior thinks. None of them, even collectively, have earned the right to have a vote in the matter, or at least not one that counts for me.

Science seems to me to be a matter of probability rather than certainty. We need excellence and expertise to be respected and treasured, even if we don’t understand it. We need systems of evaluation to discern from all of this something not fixed for all time but the best model we have right now. We also need to be open to serious challenges to it.

• A degradation of excellence

Most of us are not equipped to analyse and understand all of this: so we need excellent experts. There seems, however, to be a degradation of excellence insidiously taking place. Some of this is driven by the scientific community’s own appetite for quantity over quality, some by honest misunderstandings by lay readers of technical documents, some by the imperfect fecundity of AI and some by bad actors of various kinds and motivations.

As to what we do about this, I’m slightly stumped. All of these trends are alarmingly well established and seem to be increasing. Perhaps part of all us needs to be more scientific – that’s to say, not to seek truth but to recognise that doubt exists but that it can be mitigated by probability.

Another is to place more, and not less, trust in expertise, particularly if this is collective. Not to do so is otherwise to stumble around trying to make sense of a round of contract bridge betting that we don’t understand. We’ll be annoying the other players, misleading the spectators and undermining the logic of the game. Above all, perhaps, we’ll also be deluding ourselves.

• Planning committees

The government is planning from September dramatically to curtail the power of planning committees in making decisions about development. So, what are these and why might this matter?

In this separate article, we take a look at the arcane but important work that planning committees do and ask whether these reforms are actually addressing a real problem with the planning system (there are plenty of them) or merely demonstrating that Whitehall is taking action. We also question whether this is likely to improve local engagement (I think we all know the answer to that) and how this squares with the much-vaunted moves towards devolution of power.

• The CIL scandal

We’ve been championing the cause of the victims of the injustice of the Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL) charges for some time. This was originally a thing here in West Berkshire but in 2024 the new administration introduced a complete reversal of this weaponisation against its residents. Attention has since shifted to other authorities. We’ve mainly been keeping our eye on CIL matters in Waverley, where a cluster of such cases is to be found.

A Westminster Hall debate on 29 April involved several MPs and campaigners. We haven’t had time to study all the videos and comments but the key takeaways for now are (a) that there seemed to be unanimous agreement that the current CIL legislation and associated regulations were badly in need of clarification and reform, and that the government will attend to this: and (b) that the plight of those who’ve already been caught in this nightmare has not been forgotten.

This second point is hugely encouraging. How exactly this will be accomplished remains to be seen. All the charges are issued by the local planning authority, not the government, so it’s they that will need to take action. Housing Minister Matthew Pennycook’s remarks seem to me to be pretty close to an instruction for them to do so.

Legally, this route has always been open, as West Berkshire’s change of policy in March 2024 has showed.

Morally, there was never any justification for the way councils have behaved. Any lingering feeling that they were doing the best thing under the current legislation has surely been undermined by these latest statements.

I hope that all those responsible for this in the various authorities are taking a long hard look at themselves in this new light and working out how they’re going to fix this for the residents whom they were elected or appointed to help and serve, not to persecute.

• Action now

One word of warning. If the council concerned is to be abolished in May 2027 (as Waverley and Horsham are, for example) under the local-government reorganisation, then action needs to be taken now, by all those involved, individually or collectively, to press home this advantage. It’s quite likely that the new authorities will not wish, or perhaps legally be able, to deal with transgressions committed by their predecessors.

Speaking of Waverley, hats off big-time to local campaigner Steve Dally who, despite having had his own unfair charge refunded as a result of a manifest error by the Council, has continued to campaign on behalf of those in Waverley and many other districts who’ve been less well served by their elected representatives.

He’s decided to stand as an independent in the forthcoming West Surrey elections (for a new authority which will for a year shadow the district of Waverley and five others and then replace them).

You can read his manifesto here, along with our summary of this scandal. if you imagine a beard, he even looks a bit like Sir Alan Bates, of Post Office fame. The two scandals have several points in common. Good luck to him and all those campaigning for justice on this one.

• A few bouquets

A few other bouquets while I’m at it. I’ve mentioned before and elsewhere the main heroes here in West Berkshire but I’ll do so again: Maria Dobson, Claire Rowles and Jeff Brooks.

Well done also to former WBC Lib Dem leader, and current Newbury MP, Lee Dillon. He and Jeff Brooks were responsible for getting this on the Lib Dem manifesto for the ’23 election and then doing something about it. Lee Dillon has continued to champion the plight of those affected since his election, even though the problem has been solved in his area.

West Berkshire Council has been on several occasions, including at the debate yesterday, cited as an example of a council which has behaved well on this issue. You can click here to read a statement which the Council made on this point on 30 April.

This notes that WBC was “cited as evidence that local authorities can take constructive action to remedy injustice while remaining within the regulations.” Other councils elsewhere have been given this message for two years. The message has just been sent again.

Proof if proof be needed that local action can produce national results. It’s not done yet but it looks like this might be the beginning of the end.