Volume 15: Government and Public Administration
5. Risk analysis: an analytical approach to policy-making
Introduction

5.1 Government usually involves choosing between different policy options, programmes and projects. Alternative options will have varying merits and costs and the 'right' course may not be popular. The process of choice has to be robust and transparent if the resulting decisions are to be acceptable to the public. This means using objective and widely accepted criteria that can be assessed analytically.

5.2 Governments have for many years used techniques such as risk assessment, cost-benefit analysis, and sensitivity analysis as a basis and justification for their decisions. These techniques have been developed and refined in the light of experience, a process which continued throughout the 1980s and 1990s (as the Risk Analysis Timeline in Annex 2 shows).

5.3 Practically every decision on BSE had to be made when much was uncertain - for example, whether or not to introduce a slaughter and compensation policy without knowing whether or to what extent BSE-infected cattle might be a risk to human health; and what to do about the possible risk from subclinically infected cattle without knowing which tissues, if any, were infective to humans. Doing nothing until firm information was available was itself risky, because answers to such questions might not become available for years.

5.4 Officials and Ministers had to assess the risks and the options for managing them, and to decide how to inform the public - and groups such as farmers, pharmaceutical manufacturers and vets - of the risks. How they did this is considered in the parts of this Report that tell the BSE story (volumes 3-11). This chapter gives the background on how the tools available to policy-makers developed between 1986 and 1996.

5.5 Three questions are addressed here:

1. What analytical concepts and techniques were available to government policy-makers, and when? (A timeline of concepts and publications is at Annex 2.)
2. What did Departments use these techniques for?
3. What efforts were made to disseminate ideas and approaches as they developed?