Sir Patrick Vallance: "If you're a regulator, the incentive to take risks is virtually zero"
The UK's former Chief Scientific Adviser on the future of UK tech
You all know Sir Patrick Vallance: as the UK’s former Chief Scientific Adviser, he led much of the country’s Covid response, including setting up the Vaccine Taskforce and pioneering a new model of portfolio-based state capacity for science and technology. Now, he’s on the board of ARIA, the UK’s breakthrough scientific research agency, and an adviser to our friends at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change.
But you might not know that, just before he left government, Sir Patrick led a Review into the pro-innovation regulation of technologies, covering life sciences, green industries, generative AI, drones, space, advanced manufacturing, creative industries, and the broader regulatory culture which needs to shift to unshackle founders building & accelerating the UK’s future. As we’ve discussed in our campaign to fixtheregulators, creaking regulatory capacity is constraining economic and startup growth, slowing innovation in the sectors that matter most to people’s lives, and becoming a rate limiter on UK startup and tech progress.
So it was a privilege for us to hear Sir Patrick’s excitement about the future of science and tech, his reflections on state capacity, and where the UK must go next.
Sir Patrick Vallance on the barriers holding back UK science and tech:
The UK has a good base to succeed in AI, engineering biology, quantum, green technologies and many other areas, but there’s plenty of headroom to improve regulation and procurement to double down.
We need a change in regulatory behaviour, not just rule changes. This is a key part of how the UK gets to above-average growth. The Chancellor believing regulation for innovation is an important part of an economic growth strategy is very important.
For regulators, the incentive to take risk is virtually zero. We need strong political leadership and to give regulators a clear mandate for innovation, to support them to go a bit early, to work with companies iteratively, to do things in parallel not in sequence.
The government is not set up well to procure from startups. It’s going to need quite dramatic changes. It’s designed to interact with major primes, not where innovation is happening in the smaller companies. It is incentivised to minimise risk. But we need to be prepared to accept some risk to have an effective procurement pull for innovation. Otherwise, we have missed opportunities: we help companies get started with research funding, but they have to go somewhere else to scale up and commercialise. Joining this up as an innovation pipeline would make a big difference.
Upgrading science and technology capability across government is also critical to expand policy ambition. The Vaccines Task Force established a new model for state capacity: a new precedent for adopting an at-risk portfolio approach to investment and delivery, strong scientific expertise, active investment in the wider value chain beyond procurement (R&D, manufacturing), single point of accountability, and deep interaction with companies large and small to accelerate progress.
Full interview with Sir Patrick Vallance, former UK Chief Scientific Adviser
FORM: Let’s start before everyone knew you from the pandemic. Why did you decide to join government, after a career in academia & the pharma industry?
PV: Like almost every other decision in, in my career, it was accidental. I didn't say, “I am now going to go into government.” Somebody said to me would I like to apply to be the government chief scientific advisor? And I said, no. And then I thought about it a bit afterwards. I thought maybe that would be an interesting thing to do because it broadens my science. It takes me into certain areas that I don't necessarily know about but I do have some views on. So I thought I will give it a go. I'd been at GSK for 11 years and that was probably long enough!
Did you find that role as an outsider to government to be a strength?
Having experience from both academia and private sector experience definitely helped. And having run a very big organisation — because the R&D organisation for GSK at the time was about 17,000 people — I knew about running things. Big organisations have often got the same sorts of characteristics, whether that's government or business. And so you knew how certain things would work and certain things definitely wouldn't work.
And you saw many of the same behaviours that can either get anything done or inhibit getting things done. So I think that was that definitely was helpful. And also, because outside experience in industry in particular is unusual in government, it created some degree of credibility and allowed them to get to a reasonably fast start with things.
What did you learn from the pandemic and the Vaccines Taskforce about state capacity & effective delivery?
Early on, I was actually quite worried about the ability to deliver. I wasn’t worried about the cleverness of the people, the hard working attitudes they had, or the good intents that people have. That was all clear, and good for working out policy positions, reviewing things and so on.
I was more concerned, right from the beginning actually, about delivery. I saw many of the things that big companies struggle to get right and spend all their time worrying about: Is there single point accountability? Is it clear who's in charge of this? Is there a mechanism to actually deliver what it is? Have you got the right team around you and can you assemble it? I didn’t see this working quite as well in government as I saw it working in industry.
I noticed one other thing as well. When I moved from academia to industry, as head of a big academic department at UCL, if I said that I thought something was a good idea that was often an indication that every other professor was going to point out why it wasn't, and perhaps not get it done. When I moved to GSK, if I said, in passing to somebody in the corridor, that I thought something was a good idea, I had to be careful because before I knew where I was, there was a work stream set up on it and people were actually doing something that wasn't what I meant. So I had to moderate my language. And in government, good ideas are things that people tend to think of ways to not end up with — “I don’t want all this very difficult and potentially radical and risky stuff on my plate”.
So the reason that I set up the Vaccines Task Force was I could see that a) vaccines were a possible way out of the pandemic and therefore something you really needed to concentrate on, and b) this was not going to happen just by chance and you couldn't sit back and wait and hope that you could then procure this.
You have to be an active part of trying to get a solution and that would require a different structure. At the time, of course, the Department of Health was run off its feet with a thousand other things. There was a risk that they would take the approach that they didn't need to worry about this because they vaccinated for flu every year and therefore this would be the same and at some point somebody would give them a vaccine. I didn't want to have that risk. I knew that they didn't have the capacity at the time to fully get on with this.
So I wanted to set up a team that brought in academia, industry, government and companies, both big and small; that understood what the landscape was really like across all of the potential vaccine inventors around the world; and could link it through to R&D manufacturing and procurement as well. So it was an attempt to try and bring things together and create a team that was focused only on that. Not on five other things of which that was just one, but only on that. We brought the regulators in early as well, which was incredibly important. And the structure was one of a leader who was empowered to then deliver against it.
At the end of 2020, I went back and jotted down what I thought were the key features. I won’t go through all of them, but here are four:
A single-point empowered, accountable leader.
A clear objective: get a vaccine for the population by the end of the year.
We brought in experts rapidly, and that included somebody that I brought in from GSK earlier on, who was a manufacturing expert, who could really tell ‘that one's going to be makeable, that one is not going to be makeable, that one they say they can make, but I'm worried they've got to wait’.
We didn't view it as a pure procurement problem. The whole world was trying to buy vaccines, we needed to do more than this. We needed to help with R&D and we needed to help with manufacturing, so that we become a place people want to work with us.
The private sector was involved from the beginning, and we took an at-risk Portfolio approach: in other words, we didn't know which one was going to win. So you had to bet on several horses. We knew that the most likely outcome was everything would fail, therefore you had to be prepared to have that risk that everything would fail. We always wanted there to be a legacy at the end of this, that the vaccine situation in the UK would be better than it was at the beginning because vaccines were going to be important for cancer and all sorts of other things as well.
So those were the lessons and I think they're applicable actually to some other areas of government as well.
As well as being Chief Scientific Adviser, you were National Technology Adviser — how did the roles differ and complement each other? How do you assess the maturity of scientific and technical capability across government today, from when you joined?
When I first joined, I undertook a piece of work together with Treasury, actually, called the Science Capability Review, to ask what the science situation was across government. That report, published in 2019, really looked at what was needed to try and get the internal science mechanism in government fit for purpose.
The government Chief Scientific Adviser role is essentially about science for policy, it's not about policy for science. And that's quite an important distinction. It's about how do you ensure that every policy area has the appropriate scientific input, so that policy makers can make decisions in a better way and deliver them in a way that's consistent with modern technology and approaches.
The National Technology Advisor role emerged later because we thought actually there needs to be somebody who's now able to do a bit more on policy for technology and advice on technologies, to ensure that there's a mechanism for ministers across Whitehall to understand more about technology developments, think about how interaction with companies big and small would enhance what they're doing. That was set up about 18 months or so before I finished, always with the intention that I get it set up and then the roles would be split again.
That chimes a lot with something we keep discussing at Form, about how technology progress can advance our policy ambition. We speak to many different departments and regulators who maybe don’t quite understand the frontier of technology and what’s possible, but once they do, their ambition with what they can do via policy increases. It sounds like that’s something you saw in your work? Were there any specific scientific or technological developments you’re particularly excited about that could be game-changing for the UK?
One of the reasons that we pushed to get a Chief Scientific Adviser in every department was, if you're a policy generalist, you may not know where science, technology, or engineering can make a difference. Only by having somebody there who is listening to that conversation and who understands what's happening, can they say, “by the way, have you thought of this?” Or “have you considered the technology that's coming along that might change the way you think about that?” Then you start to have the right discussion. If you just wait to be asked, or you assume that somebody at some point will come and want to look at the science, you're going to wait a long time and you'll get a very narrow definition of where science, technology or engineering could make a difference.
So, take green technologies: there's a huge opportunity there. There's a massive market across the world, and if the UK is great at getting them moving fast, great at procuring them, great at having regulation which allows them to come through in an appropriate way quickly, then we will absolutely have a good return on that. Similarly, quantum technologies are going to be big and we've got quite a good base in the UK for that. Engineering biology is going to be huge in terms of how it changes manufacturing and how it changes think about materials, as well as the obvious life sciences. And we need AI soon. We can’t just keep viewing AI as ‘what are the safety issues?’. Of course there are safety issues, but there are massive opportunities too. So there are some obvious areas where we'd be stupid not to really double down.
But that's not quite the same as saying you're going to pick winners and do nothing else. Because the other thing that I think any government needs to do is to support very strongly the curiosity-driven science, which is going to be doing things that are obvious in 20 years time.
That's very true. And it relates to your point about having regulation that allows technologies to come through quickly. When we speak to policymakers about this, there’s always a question around which technologies we should be prioritising. And there are a few candidates you’ve mentioned, but you also need a bit of a portfolio approach: some would have an impact right away, others in a year, others in five years, and others that are much, much further out, like neural interfaces. And before you left government, you actually led the Pro-Innovation Regulation of Technologies Review — how did this come to be? How important do you really think this is for UK growth, relative to all the other things that policymakers might be thinking about?
One of the things that I did as National Technology Advisor, and together with the science team in the department, was to try and work out what a framework for really strong science activity across the country would look like. So that was the R&D framework, and as part of that, it's very obvious if you don't get the regulation bit right you've got a problem.
So the Chancellor asked me to do a review on pro-innovation regulation, which is important. If the Chancellor believes that regulation for innovation is an important part of a growth strategy, that carries a lot of weight. And therefore you're starting from quite a good position with the review. In my experience, too many reports are written where there isn't a clear customer, and it's not clear how something's going to happen. This was completely different because our customer was asking “I really want this and I believe this is going to be important for growth. Can you give me something which is actionable? And we'll get on with it.” So I think you'll see that in whichever government is there after the election. This is a key part of how the UK gets to growth above average.
He asked me five months before I was due to finish, and so I pointed out to him it was going to be a short review. And we covered a number of issues. But I think what rapidly became clear — if you take the example from the vaccines task force — was not a single change in regulatory rules was required, but a significant change in regulatory behaviour was required.
And that, really, was possible, in part, because at that moment there was political leadership which enabled the regulators to take more risk. And when I say risk, I don't mean safety risk, but just being prepared to take a risk on going a bit early: working with companies in a way that was iterative rather than just waiting to receive something, being prepared to do things in parallel rather than in sequence. Those sorts of things were important, and really made a difference.
And if you think about it, if you're a regulator, the incentive for you to take any of those risks is virtually zero. Because if something goes wrong, you'll get blamed, and if something goes right, you won't get praised. And that, that's the life of a regulator. The pro-innovation regulation papers try to address specific blocks, such as skills and the need to have experimental regulation, but also try to deal with the need for very strong, clear political leadership that says we want you to put innovation as a key mandate, as a regulator.
Finally, you’ve mentioned procurement which, similarly to regulation, is really grounded in and shapes the operating reality for companies. Can you give a flavour of what you think some of the biggest challenges are, and what might need to happen?
I think government is not set up well to procure from smaller companies. It's designed almost purposefully to be an interactor with major primes, not with where lots of innovation is occurring. And government systems are designed not to allow much risk in the system.
You can't really be in the business of pulling through innovation with a procurement pull, unless you're prepared to accept you'll get some things wrong. And the problem often is, if you get something wrong, the National Audit Office will say you're wasting public money, or the Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee will say you're wasting public money. That is a problem. That's exactly why it's so important, like the Vaccines Taskforce, to take a portfolio approach and accept that many things would fail.
So I think the prospect that government can be a major pull through of innovation through procurement is a very exciting one, but it's going to need quite dramatic changes to how we think about procurement across the system. And I hope that happens.
I was speaking to entrepreneurs recently who've got a company that's been quite well funded by grants from Innovate UK as well as from VC. They were saying how brilliant it was that they got that opportunity to get started, and they're now at the stage where they've got a product, but they're getting nowhere at all with any interaction with government for procurement. They said we're now global, so we're probably going to go somewhere else and do that. And that seems like a huge missed opportunity for the UK. We started it, we gave them money, we got them going, they're going well, and now we haven't got that procurement pull. Joining this up as an innovation pipeline, where the left hand and the right hand are actually working together, I think would make a big difference.
Hit reply with follow up questions, suggestions of technology or policy leaders we should interview, or get in touch if you’re building at the frontier of tech and regulation.