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Professor Sir John Aston is Harding Professor of Statistics in Public Life at the University of Cambridge Statistical Laboratory. Here, he describes how connections made through CSaP helped him make the transition from working in academia to taking on the role of Chief Scientific Adviser in the Home Office.
As a statistician, I spend a lot of my time looking at data across many different disciplines, particularly medical data in healthcare and economics, where statistics can make a real difference.
I came to Cambridge about 10 years ago and became involved in lots of interesting collaborations across the University. I was then invited to be part of a team that helped set up the Alan Turing Institute – a collaboration involving a number of other universities – and looked at data science more widely. That got me interested in looking at the potential policy implications of my work.
My connections with Rob Doubleday and meetings with CSaP Policy Fellows helped in my understanding of how government works and what the role of a Chief Scientific Adviser (CSA) in government entails. A meeting with Professor Sir Chris Whitty when he gave the CSaP annual lecture in 2017, offered me an insight into the role of a government CSA and how academics in government adapt to a different way of working.
When I became CSA in 2017, and latterly Director-General for Science, Technology, Analysis, Research and Strategy (STARS), at the Home Office, I worked on all aspects of science including physical, technological, biological and the social sciences. I had the opportunity to look at how data is used for public policy making – crime and policing, immigration, and national security.
Now back in Cambridge, a lot of my research and thinking is on how statistics, evidence and science is used in the policy making process. I've been very fortunate to meet a lot of policy makers from different departments and get a chance to see the bigger picture.
More recently, I've been appointed as one of 12 members on the Mayor of London's London Policing Board, which has been set up in response to the Casey Review of the Metropolitan Police. I’m looking at how oversight of the Metropolitan Police can be used to drive through the reforms that were recommended in response to the Review.
“Coming from an academic background, the secondment into government helped me to better understand the kinds of issues and questions that government has to grapple with. The questions that researchers care about and think are important don’t always map onto the challenges and priorities of government.”
Since my secondment into government, I have found it really useful to keep the dialogue with policy makers going. As a statistician, I meet with Policy Fellows from many different backgrounds working in different parts of government. As my academic great grandfather John Tukey once said, “the best thing about being a statistician is you get to play in everybody else’s backyard.”
The format of the Fellowship works well; it’s a trusted space where you can really talk about what is important and communicate in a way that is easy to understand. It’s not just a quick conversation or a meeting with ten other people where you’re trying to get your voice heard. Many of the policy makers I have met have said they will go back to their team and pass on what they have learned.
“Policy Fellows can feel confident that the meetings will be useful to both of us and done in a way that allows people to ask questions that are sometimes difficult to ask – and that will be respected ”
One of the questions that comes up a lot in my meetings with policy makers is how best to communicate scientific evidence and information to the public in a way that is easily accessible. This is interesting as it has actually become an academic discipline in its own right – with research being done on how to do it, and what works and what doesn’t – which seems to surprise many policy makers. We’re really trying to understand the role of the communicator, the information itself and how it is communicated; whether you just want to inform people about the data or imply what the data means, there’s a difference.
“I really enjoy meeting the Policy Fellows; it’s always fun and it’s always interesting. It’s something that the University should be very proud of having and not something that has been successfully replicated anywhere else.”
The fact that CSaP has this steady engagement with policy makers and that it is so highly regarded, means that policy makers who have been part of the CSaP programme genuinely feel they’ve achieved something. This is helpful for academics who are asked to meet them. I've never met a Policy Fellow who didn’t want to be here; they always want to learn and to increase their understanding of the science and evidence around their particular areas of policy. This means you get a receptive audience and can have the conversation that really matters.