Select Committee Governance and the Production of Evidence: The Case of UK E-cigarettes Policy

Abstract

This chapter examines the process of evidence use within the Westminster select committee system and the potential this offers for health-harming industries to influence the evidentiary content of policy debates. It introduces these issues through the example of the regulatory debate on electronic cigarettes and the 2018 Science and Technology enquiry into their regulations. Through this we identify a more general set of issues around the governance of select committees, and their generation and promotion of policy-relevant evidence, which is under-explored in the current research literature. The currently opaque accountability mechanisms create a significant opportunity for well-resourced policy actors, including trans-national corporations, to shape the evidentiary content of policy debates, via committee evidence gathering and synthesis processes and the potentially influential reports generated from this. Studies of the tobacco and other health-harming industries identify a long-standing strategy of seeking to ‘capture’ apparently independent bodies to generate research amenable to their underlying policy objectives. Such outputs are particularly valuable to corporate political actors, as they have the appearance of separation from the industry and enjoy the kudos associated with entities at the heart of the body politic. As such, it raises important questions about the oversight of evidence production by government bodies.

How Policy Appetites Shape, and Are Shaped by Evidence Production and Use

“…(Public health researcher) By extension the credibility of research in general can be questioned, where "scientists as 'strategists' engaged in a struggle for credibility" (Brown, 2015). As described above, by instating that RCT and systematic review evidence forms the only credible basis for action, researchers have opened the door to a relatively easy way for other actors to establish themselves as credible participants in policy debates (see Chapter 9, Hawkins & Oliver, 2022). Much has been written about the ways in which corporations create and curate evidence bases in order to generate lack of certainty, or to attack policy positions which might be detrimental to their growth.…”