The smog, which built up from traffic fumes during four windless days
in December 1991, was the worst in Britain in recent years. Many of those
who died had probably been suffering from heart disease and respiratory
problems.

Evidence of the deaths has been compiled by Ross Anderson, an epidemiologist
at St George’s Hospital in south London. He will present a summary of his
results to a meeting of the British Thoracic Society next week.

But Anderson’s results have already convinced the Department of Health
to act. Under air quality guidelines which it set last year, no public warning
would be given if the 1991 smog was repeated today, because the level of
pollutants would not be high enough.

The smog blanketed London from the morning of Thursday 12 December
until winds cleared the air the following Sunday evening. Two pollutants
reached exceptionally high concentrations: nitrogen dioxide levels peaked
at 423 parts per billion, the highest level ever recorded in Britain, and
particulates, measured as the amount of black smoke in the air, reached
228 micrograms per cubic metre.

By looking at the number of people in London who died the week before
the smog, and the number who died in the same week in previous years, Anderson
calculated the expected number of deaths for the seven days starting on
12 December. He then compared this figure with the number of people who
actually died.

Anderson found that 10 per cent more people than expected died during
the smog. He declines to say how many deaths make up the 10 per cent or
to comment on his findings until next week’s meeting.

But government figures show that about 1700 people were registered dead
during the fateful week, suggesting that about 160 extra people died during
the smog.

Anderson found the number of people who died from respiratory diseases,
including asthma and severe lung disease, was 22 per cent higher than expected
during the week of the smog. The number of people who died from cardiovascular
disease was 14 per cent higher.

An epidemiological study such as Anderson’s cannot prove that air pollution
caused the extra deaths. But the abstract of Anderson’s paper concludes:
‘The results suggest an increase in mortality occurred during the episode
week. This is consistent with an effect of air pollution.’

Stephen Holgate, professor of immunopharmacology at the University of
Southampton, says it is difficult to be sure that the effect Anderson found
was not caused by weather or another unexpected factor. But the findings
do point to pollution. ‘It is an important result. It reflects the findings
coming out of other countries,’ he says.

It is not clear whether nitrogen dioxide or particulates were to blame.
The nitrogen dioxide levels were more extreme. But a report on the pollutant
last year by the government’s Advisory Group on the Medical Aspects of
Air Pollution Episodes found evidence of only weak effects on breathing
at concentrations up to 600 ppb.

There is growing concern about particulates: Joel Schwartz, an epidemiologist
from Harvard University, calculated that they kill 10 000 people a year
in England and Wales (‘Dying from too much dust’, ¿ìè¶ÌÊÓƵ, 12 March).
Douglas Dockery, another epidemiologist at Harvard, says Anderson’s results
fit the pattern he has seen in other cities. ‘It is just what we would have
expected from the particulate concentrations,’ says Dockery.

According to John Bower of the National Environmental Technology Centre
near Culham, Oxfordshire, episodes as bad as the 1991 smog are rare. But
they remain possible, despite new regulations intended to reduce vehicle
emissions. ‘If the same weather happens again, it would happen again,’ he
says.

Last year, the Department of Health’s advisory group set a limit of
600 ppb for nitrogen dioxide before the government issued a public health
warning. At the department’s request, the advisory group is meeting this
week to review the limit.

Three thousand a year sounds a lot. And it is. It’s about the same as
the number of people who die from arteriosclerosis, and more than the number
who die from cancer of the kidney.

Within a narrow professional circle, the person in question has made
little secret of his views. Plenty of people in the air pollution business
know who he is. But he is not prepared to go public. Why?

It is not in the nature of scientists to be secretive. They value the
free flow of information too highly for that. And the idea that the tiny
black specks of unburnt diesel fuel are lethal is not new.

In March, this magazine reported the views of Joel Schwartz, an epidemiologist
at the US government’s Environmental Protection Agency, on particulates
less than 10 micrometres in diameter – the so-called PM10 (‘Dying from too
much dust’, 12 March). Schwartz calculates the number of deaths in England
and Wales from PM10 from all sources to be 10 000 a year. Those most at
risk are probably people with asthma, the elderly and others with weak lungs.
If diesel vehicles account for 30 per cent of the PM10 emissions from all
sources (as suggested by a recent report for the Department of the Environment),
then the adviser’s estimate makes some sense.

A government adviser has to maintain a special degree of caution. But
this has not stopped our man saying things that reflect badly on ministers
in the past. No, I suspect there are two reasons for his coyness. The first
is simply that no one wants him to speak out. After all, aren’t diesels
the green cars, the ones that use less fuel than petrol-run cars and therefore
conserve natural resources and reduce global warming?

Take the general public. Helped along by advertising from car companies,
they have become used to the idea that diesel cars are greener than petrol
ones. But diesels produce two-thirds of the PM10 emissions from British
vehicles. The last thing anybody driving a diesel car wants to be told is
that their emissions are killing people. Especially since it might reduce
the value of their vehicle.

The government is equally keen to avoid looking stupid. As recently
as the Budget of March 1992, the Treasury and the Departments of the Environment
and Transport combined to cut the price of diesel relative to leaded petrol.
They also gave owners of fleet cars a tax incentive to run diesel cars.
It’s a bit soon for a U-turn, isn’t it?

Then there’s the environmentalist lobby. Friends of the Earth is currently
drafting a piece of advice for would-be car owners, telling them that ‘no
one in their right mind would recommend diesel’ in the light of the health
evidence against PM10 emissions. And yet not so long ago FoE was recommending
drivers who spend most of their time in cities to go for diesel cars. Whoops!

Joining this unlikely alliance are the bus, coach and lorry operators.
They have no desire to be forced down the route taken in Los Angeles, where
a bus company is refitting its buses with engines that run on methanol.
But those with most to lose are the car and oil companies. Urged on by ministers
and greens, they have been gearing up for a big increase in the proportion
of diesel cars and lorries on British roads.

Car companies have begun producing new diesel models to sell to the
public on the basis of their supposedly green credentials. The strategy
has been such a success that about one in five new cars in Britain is now
a diesel. Peugeot, for example, leapt onto the bandwagon with its 306 Diesel.
Its claim to be doing its ‘bit to help the planet’ must now be seen to be
misleading. Certainly Peugeot’s marketing department won’t relish the idea
that its diesels are contributing to polishing off grannie.

Likewise, oil companies have invested in new refineries to produce diesel
fuels. But it will be a mite harder for Esso to claim that its new Diesel
2000 is ‘environmentally friendly’ if government departments tell its customers
that diesel is poisoning the air we breathe.

None of this is meant to suggest a grand conspiracy of silence. It
is just that from the point of view of a government adviser, if you have
to overturn an orthodoxy, it is nice to feel that someone, somewhere is
rooting for you. But until now, he has been more or less on his own.

Unfortunately for all concerned, the U-turn is inevitable. Diesel cars
are for the high jump. As with lead in petrol, the early evidence against
PM10 is epidemiological and therefore treated with suspicion by toxicologists.
But, as with lead, the list of studies finding a connection between PM10
and ill health is now so long that it cannot be ignored. Quietly, the Department
of Health this year shifted its position on diesel from neutrality to one
advocating a precautionary approach. Even though the evidence is short of
conclusive, the department says ‘any reduction in particulate levels would
be welcome’.

And this brings us to the second plausible reason for our man’s reluctance
to put the boot in: a hope that the government will quickly do something
about the problem. Whether that hope is fulfilled depends on the outcome
of a battle being fought between departments within Whitehall. Health and
Environment want action now. Transport is sceptical and the Treasury is
ever keen to avoid any new spending.

Cabinet ministers are already talking about the problem. If they want
to show that they are dealing with it thoroughly, there are three things
they should do. All three require action to be taken in this November’s
Budget, and since negotiations on that are already getting under way, they
should be considered now. And there is no reason why they should not be
announced in the government’s statement on air pollution, due this autumn.

One idea being floated is to get rid of the old diesel vehicles, which
are the most polluting. It’s a good one. The government could require all
diesel vehicles more than 10 years old to be refitted with a modern engine,
or be scrapped. This would upset some owners, especially bus operators with
old fleets. But that could be overcome with grants or tax incentives for
the purchase of new engines or vehicles. The government in France has already
gone down this road. Owners who trade in their old diesel cars for new ones
receive a discount running into hundreds of pounds. Government and manufacturers
share the cost.

Secondly, the Treasury should use its taxation rules to make diesel
vehicles less attractive. It should raise the price of diesel relative to
petrol – after all, what now is the case for making diesel cheaper than
leaded petrol? And it should stop giving companies tax breaks to buy fleets
of diesel cars. Buyers will soon get the message.

Thirdly, there are now formulations of diesel which have a lower sulphur
content, and hence lower emissions of particulates. Ministers should make
the duty on these lower than that on ordinary diesel.

If ministers pass by this opportunity to cut diesel emissions of PM10,
what then? At the end of this year, the Department of Health will publish
a report on particulates from one of its advisory committees. Once that
happens, it is unlikely that our quiet, adviser or his equally knowledgeable
colleagues, will keep their counsel.

Results from experiments on a new particle collider at DESY, the German
particle physics laboratory near Hamburg, have suddenly brought the pomeron
back to life. ‘Some people have been completely shocked,’ says Gunter Wolf,
a senior researcher at DESY. ‘The pomeron dropped out of fashion because
there was no way to connect it with QCD. There still isn’t. But the pomeron
may be the best way to explain what we’re seeing.’

DESY’s Hera collider accelerates needle-thin beams of protons and electrons
in opposite directions around a 6.3-kilometre ring, colliding the particles
at energies of about 850 gigaelectronvolts. The purpose of the collisions
is to study the trios of quarks that are the constituents of protons.

Evidence for the pomeron comes from a small fraction of one type of
collision in Hera. In these events, the electron emits a virtual photon
(one with negative energy) that penetrates deep inside a proton and scatters
off the quarks. Most of the time, the energy from these collisions conjures
up a shower of particles which sprays the whole of the detector around
the collision point. In about 10 per cent of collisions, however, much of
the detector sees no particles at all.

There is no way to explain these gaps if virtual photons merely scatter
off quarks and gluons. But they can be explained if the proton first emits
a particle – a pomeron – which is then struck by the photon. The collision
of pomeron and photon would generate a shower of particles in the pattern
observed at Hera, while the proton continued undetected straight down the
tube of the accelerator.

Quite what a pomeron is, nobody is sure. James Stirling, a theorist
at the University of Durham, says: ‘That is the key question, and it is
very hard to answer.’

It could be a new fundamental particle. But that would put it outside
the standard model of particle physics, so this explanation is discounted
by physicists. More likely, the pomeron could be a tight grouping of gluons.
Indeed, some of the recent results from Hera suggest that the pomeron is
made up of smaller particles.

But even this more conventional explanation would make the pomeron unique.
Pomerons appear to exist only in the short-lived exchanges between particles.
And all the known exchange particles are either fundamental, like photons
and gluons, or identified with known heavy particles such as pions and kaons.
The pomeron appears to be neither.

Stirling admits to being baffled, and contrasts the experiment with
the search for the top quark. There, physicists have spent 20 years hunting
evidence of a particle they feel sure exists. Meanwhile, despite QCD’s failure
to explain the original experimental evidence which prompted Pomeranchuk’s
work in the first place, the same people have spent just as long trying
to forget the awkward pomeron.

‘It’s not like the top, where you can show ten events and everyone goes
‘gee whiz’. It’s much more tricky than that,’ says Stirling. ‘And what is
interesting about the top after you’ve discovered it? Not much. This is
much more exciting.’

It is hard to find anyone in Waldegrave’s Office of Science and Technology
who does not confess to trepidation in the wake of the local election results.
And no wonder. If Waldegrave were to shuffle quietly off the Cabinet coil,
the consequences for the OST and scientists themselves could be severe.
One school of thought is no Waldegrave, no Cabinet minister for science.

It is a plausible scenario. Waldegrave sits in Cabinet by virtue of
his position as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. But this office has
served different prime ministers in different ways. Margaret Thatcher, for
example, used it as a sinecure for Conservative Party chairmen, as a second
Cabinet minister for the Department of Trade and Industry and, with Lord
Gowrie, as a means to bring a minister for the arts into the Cabinet.

John Major’s big idea used to be the Citizen’s Charter. Hence Waldegrave
currently runs the Office of Public Service and Science. If the Prime Minister
decides to sack Waldegrave, he might decide to ditch the OPSS, too. In that
case, runs the argument, the OST would be swallowed up by another department
and possibly disbanded. Science would be unlikely to end up in the charge
of a Cabinet minister with the time to take it seriously.

That would be a real blow. The administration of science went virtually
untouched for 22 years until Waldegrave turned up. The reason in most cases
was not that ministers did not care about science. Stuck with permanent
crisis management at the old Department of Education and Science, they just
did not have time.

The new arrangement has given scientists a substantial White Paper,
revamped the research council system, introduced a Technology Foresight
Programme to tighten ties with industry, a government-wide science policy
of sorts in the form of the Forward Look which outlines departments’ research
plans for the coming years, reformed the PhD system and funded the first
national science week for the public. For the first time in decades the
government machine has been working overtime on science. And – ignore the
cynics – that knocks spots off benign neglect.

Of course, the OPSS might soldier on without Waldegrave, and even if
it doesn’t, the OST might find a genuine friend elsewhere in the Cabinet.
But ‘might’ is the operative word.

At first sight, the omens for Waldegrave are not good. He clung onto
his place in the Cabinet after a disastrous general election campaign at
the Department of Health and has yet to bounce back politically. The arms
for Iraq scandal overshadows his entire performance. The Citizen’s Charter
is going nowhere. His performances in the House of Commons are reckoned
a stride short of rousing. And science, despite his best efforts, is too
marginal for the media to produce the headlines that raise a minister’s
profile.

Even worse, the scientists themselves, for so long approving, are turning
critical. They do not like Waldegrave’s plans to make all PhD students stop
off and do a Master’s degree first. And they find the Efficiency Unit’s
plans to rationalise government laboratories (which could be the start of
the long-mooted break-up of the Natural Environment Research Council)
irrational. Select committees in the Commons and the Lords are inquiring
into these schemes and have the capacity to generate damaging publicity
at just the wrong time.

For such problems, Waldegrave has only himself to blame. The seeds of
both the plan for postgraduates and the laboratory reorganisation were thrown
into the White Paper without proper consultation. The error could be costly.
If it appears that even the scientists want a new face, John Major might
as well give them one.

But all is not lost. In the first place, Waldegrave appears to be quite
a long way down the Cabinet hit list. The first of the current crop of reshuffle
stories, reporting high-level calls for a return of Tory heavyweights like
Geoffrey Howe, appeared as front page leads in the Financial Times and The
Daily Telegraph on 20 April. Both stories put several of Waldegrave’s colleagues
ahead of him for the firing line. So he could be saved if the Prime Minister
decides that three new faces rather than six is enough.

Secondly, sacking Waldegrave raises questions about the success or otherwise
of the Citizen’s Charter. Since this is the one new idea which the public
associates with Major himself, that might undermine the public relations
objective of a reshuffle.

Thirdly, Waldegrave is not one of the Cabinet who has been openly scheming
against Major.

What should be the response of scientists to Waldegrave’s predicament?
The vast majority will, of course, sail on oblivious. Science journalists
in Britain have long since despaired of ever provoking letters to their
editors with stories about science policy. But anyone who has recently talked
to Bill Stewart, head of OST, might have a different attitude. Stewart has
become fond of saying, ‘I have a good working relationship with Waldegrave.’
On reflection, other scientists might be tempted to come to the same conclusion.

The days when scientists were left to get on with their own thing (at
the taxpayer’s expense) are over. Many of the key decisions have now moved
firmly into the hands of ministers and their civil servants. To his credit,
Waldegrave has responded to the new arrangements by doing a lot of listening.
He has proved amenable to reason.

¿ìè¶ÌÊÓƵs should briefly ponder how they would deal with the arbitrariness
of some of the other members of the Cabinet. How would they like to be on
the receiving end of diktats from Michael Heseltine, the President of the
Board of Trade, or the Home Secretary Michael Howard? They should stir themselves
and tell Major whether they want Waldegrave to stay, or go.

John Marks, one of three dissenting voices on the 14-member School Curriculum
and Assessment Authority, which drew up the revised curriculum, says the
proposals do not fix the problems with the old formula. In the past, he
says, children as young as seven have spent up to three weeks looking for
patterns in the order of prime numbers – a task which has baffled academic
mathematicians for centuries.

The proposed curriculum will continue this practice. ‘They are almost
trying to turn these children into research mathematicians,’ says Marks.

Sigbert Prais, a researcher at the National Institute for Economic and
Social Research, says that such investigations are ‘an excuse by teachers
for not teaching children what 3 and 4 add up to’. ‘This kind of trendy
mathematics is not taught anywhere else in Europe,’ says Prais.

But Wilfred Cockroft, author of an influential report on school mathematics
for the government in 1982, says investigation is a natural part of mathematics.
‘It is not the main thing,’ he says. ‘But in its place, it is a good thing
to do.’

After almost a year of discussion, universities, scientists and industry
remain united in their opposition to the degree, which is intended to train
prospective PhD students to be research scientists. In a report published
this week, the Royal Society says the scheme is damaging and unnecessary.

Last year’s White Paper on science said that anyone wanting to take
a PhD would ‘normally’ have to acquire a Master’s degree first. The idea
was to give students basic skills in research, communication and management
before they launched into a three-year programme of research. It was greeted
with little enthusiasm. The Science and Engineering Research Council calculated
that the cost of financing graduate students for an extra year would force
it to reduce the number of PhD candidates it trained by 30 per cent.

In February, in an attempt to win over the opposition, Waldegrave proposed
a new type of degree, the Research Master (MRes). Rather than force all
postgraduates to delay the start of their PhD for a year after taking their
first degree, Waldegrave offered to allow some students to register for
a PhD course immediately and fulfil the requirements of an MRes during the
course of their research. He also indicated that he might allow an exemption
from the MRes for some students who had taken four-year first degrees.

These concessions have not been enough. Although a few university departments
have expressed some enthusiasm for the MRes, the Committee of Vice-Chancellors
and Principals reports ‘widespread hostility’ in the universities.

Joe Vinen, author of the Royal Society’s report on the MRes, says: ‘Someone
with an MRes is likely to be labelled a failed PhD. It’s difficult to see
how it can be interpreted any other way.’ The cut in the number of PhD students
would be ‘unjustifiably damaging’, says the society.

The chemicals and pharmaceuticals industries, which recruit many scientists
with PhDs, are equally unhappy. ‘It’s very difficult to envisage the MRes
as a useful qualification for our industry,’ says Paul Leonard, science
spokesman for the Chemical Industries Association. If companies want generalists,
they hire people with a BSc, says Leonard. If they want specialists, they
hire PhDs.

The Council of Science and Technology Institutes, which represents seven
scientific societies, met staff from Waldegrave’s Office of Science and
Technology last month. The societies’ representatives spent the two-hour
meeting attacking the idea.

The Royal Society wants the government to authorise more four-year undergraduate
courses instead.

Despite spending more than £6 billion a year on science, government
departments have only rarely published their research policies in the past.
Nor has there been much coordination between departments. Forward Look*,
to be published annually by Stewart’s Office of Science and Technology,
aims to remedy that.

The OST has told government departments to spell out their research
goals and how they plan to achieve them. Departments must also explain how
these plans will contribute to wealth creation, now the supreme objective
of government-funded research. Forward Look establishes performance indicators
against which a department’s progress can be measured.

The Ministry of Defence, for example, says it will concentrate its funding
in six key areas, ranging from surveillance techniques, including radar,
to ‘advanced combat platforms’ such as ships, tanks and aircraft. The ministry
also commits itself to working more closely with civilian firms to make
the most of its research.

Forward Look does not remove spending decisions from departments. Nevertheless,
it is a key component of the OST’s attempt to create a national research
strategy. ‘We’re trying to get some collective vision for the future,’ says
Stewart. ‘Departments can’t say they’ve got a long-term research strategy
and then start chopping and changing it.’

As for the OST, its plans for Britain’s research councils include ‘new
structures and systems’ to allocate funds. But this will not mean the end
of peer review of proposals to decide where money should be spent, says
Stewart. ‘Decisions on which science to do within specific envelopes must
be decided by the scientists.’

John Cadogan, the director-general of the research councils, is to review
the councils’ funding priorities. And LINK, the OST’s scheme for encouraging
collaboration between academia and industry, is to be relaunched on a grander
scale later this year.

Meanwhile, the drive for more private-sector involvement in government
laboratories will continue, whatever the outcome of the report being finalised
by the government’s Efficiency Unit (This Week, 23 April). Departments have
been asked to report their progress in increasing the number of research
contracts awarded by competitive tendering.

*Forward Look of Government-funded Science, Engineering and Technology,
HMSO.

Particle physicists have been hunting the top quark for more than a
decade. Its existence is one of the most important pieces of the standard
model of subatomic physics that has yet to be proved.

Since the end of last year, researchers at Fermilab have been analysing
the results of experiments carried out with their Tevatron proton-antiproton
collider. They are looking for evidence that top quarks were created in
the collisions. ‘But they haven’t quite got the data they would like,’ says
Roger Cashmore, a physicist at the University of Oxford who has worked at
Fermilab. ‘They are writing a big paper to tell the rest of the world what
they have got. But everyone is going to have to make up their own mind about
whether they have found the top.’

The problem is that it is impossible to see top quarks themselves in
the Tevatron. If the collider is making any, they will be in the form of
a pair of quarks – a top and an antitop – which decay into other particles
too quickly to be detected. These particles decay to form yet more particles.
Physicists can only decide whether the top quark was there by looking at
the final shower of particles hitting their detectors.

There are 16 distinct types of shower that a top-antitop pair could
generate. Unfortunately, other pairs of particles, such as W and anti-W,
can cause these same showers. To say they have definitely found the top
quark, Fermilab’s physicists have to find more of the right type of showers
than they could reasonably expect from the decay of the other particles.
Fermilab has found a few extra showers, but not enough to pass the usual
statistical tests of reliability, says Cashmore.

The experiments have shown that the mass of the top quark is much larger
than previous experiments had implied. If it exists, it must weigh at least
150 gigaelectronvolts, says Robert Hollebeek, a physicist at the University
of Pennsylvania who has worked on the experiments. That makes the top at
least fifty times the mass of any other quark and three times the mass of
an entire atom of tin. ‘It is extraordinarily heavy,’ says Hollebeek.

The Tevatron began a new series of experiments earlier this year. The
analysis of that data will probably be com- pleted in 18 months. By then,
Fermilab expects to be able definitively to confirm or deny the existence
of the top quark – probably.

The unit is scrutinising government research laboratories to see if
any can be privatised or made more cost-effective by other means. Some signs
of its intentions were expected in its interim report, published early this
month, but that was short on recommendations. By contrast, the letter outlines
a radical reorganisation. Under the plan, the Scottish Office would take
ownership of all fisheries and marine science institutions, including the
Natural Environment Research Council’s Plymouth Marine Laboratory. The NERC
would be responsible for the ‘non-marine environment’, and take over the
Scottish Office’s Macaulay Land Use Research Institute and the Forestry
Commission Research Laboratory.

The Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) would
gain five new laboratories in its area. And the Ministry of Agriculture,
Fisheries and Food (MAFF) would take one or two laboratories from other
arms of government, including the Scottish Agricultural Science Service.
Its grouping would deal with research that underpins farming policy.

The fifth grouping would be made by merging the Metropolitan Police
Forensic Science Laboratory with the Home Office’s forensic laboratory at
Aldermaston.

The letter from the Efficiency Unit describes the arrangements as ‘the
preferred options, as we now see them’. By merging institutions, the unit
expects to save money. And by placing each grouping under the control of
a chief executive – who could order what work laboratories take on – it
says it hopes to create a clear boundary between the purchasers of research,
such as the research councils and government departments, and the laboratories
which do the work.

After the unit has received comments on the letter, it will draw up
a final plan. This will have to be approved by science minister William
Waldegrave and the ministers of other, affected departments. But this process
may not run smoothly. Under the unit’s plan, the Scottish Office would lose
its source of advice on agriculture, and MAFF would have no fisheries experts.
Opinion within both departments is that they will oppose such changes.

Equally, the NERC is dismayed by the prospect of losing control of its
marine research laboratories. John Knill, chairman of the council until
last year, believes the proposals are ‘bizarre’. ‘They should think again,’
he says. On the other hand, the BBSRC would be pleased to acquire five new
institutions.

Even if the unit is unable to convince ministers to cede ownership of
their laboratories, it is likely to continue to press for rationalisation.
But the scope for savings is also disputed. The unit’s letter says, for
example, there is ‘particular scope’ to save money by bringing together
the BBSRC’s Institute of Animal Health and the Scottish Office’s Moredun
Research Institute.

But John Bourne, director of the Institute of Animal Health, disagrees:
‘There’s no overlap between us.’ Although both institutes work on animal
pathogens, ‘there are no pathogens we both work on’, he says. Merging the
laboratories on one site would need massive investment, he says.

Labour’s science spokesman, Lewis Moonie, thinks the proposals are ‘crazy’.
‘We don’t trust departments such as the Scottish Office to run basic science,’
he says. ‘They just cut and cut again.

Science minister William Waldegrave had asked the unit to find ways
to privatise government laboratories, rationalise them and explore ways
of making them more profitable. The review has been criticised by the Royal
Society for being secretive and misguided. The unit is due to present its
final report to ministers later in the year.

In its interim report the unit makes no firm recommendations for the
future of the laboratories, which employ more than 32 000 people and spend
£1.3 billion a year.

The unit says it has failed to find any new candidates for privatisation.
‘We have found no clear-cut cases of suitability for early privatisation
. . . within three to five years . . . over and above those already identified
in departmental reviews,’ it says. Individual departments have already been
reviewing the potential for privatising some government laboratories.

The unit considered creating a civil research agency from 21 institutions
owned by government departments. The agency would provide some potential
for savings by sharing staff, says the unit. But the scope for cost-cutting
would be reduced by, for example, privatising the Department of Trade and
Industry’s laboratories.

The unit found more scope for cost-cutting by grouping the departmental
laboratories with research council institutes, such as the 23 laboratories
concerned with agriculture and food research. But, in general, the unit
failed to find much scope for rationalisation: ‘We are not sure, as yet,
whether we have found overcapacity,’ it says. ‘We found few examples of
actual duplication of activity.’

The report says a central agency would have so many customers it would
be difficult to manage. A new agency would have ‘considerably increased
difficulty in maintaining a sense of mission and obtaining strategic direction’.

The research councils are pleased by the report. ‘We are encouraged
by the way the thinking is going,’ says Nick Winterton, director of corporate
affairs at the Medical Research Council. ‘There is a lot of common sense.’

In the past the unit has said the status quo is rarely an option. This
report says ‘the status quo is all right’, says Valerie Ellis of the Institution
of Professionals, Managers and Specialists. Many who have read the report,
however, suspect the Efficiency Unit is waiting for a political direction.
‘In the end, this will come down to ministers,’ says one departmental chief
scientist. ‘It’s a political decision.’