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John Denham is a rare creature: a British cabinet minister with a science degree. Part of his brief as Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills is to make sure scientists are listened to. Jeremy Webb asked him about the role of science within government, why he is set on introducing ID cards, and what persuaded him to become a politician in the first place

After studying chemistry at university you went on to work for various charities. What did you hope to achieve?

I wanted to achieve change and, because of my political instincts, progressive change. I was particularly keen, when working for Friends of the Earth in the early days, to be part of a growing environmental movement. Working for groups like War on Want and Oxfam, it was to achieve change on Third World development in general but in particular about resolving what was then emerging as the Third World debt crisis. I was in at the very early stages of the campaigning which led ultimately to the campaign.

Then you switched to politics. Why did you make that change, and have you been able to stay true to your original motivation?

I have always been in both worlds. When I started working for voluntary organisations, I was a member of the Labour Party. I stood for the local council and got elected in 1981. So I’ve always had a foot in the camps of both the person who is idealistic and pushing for change from outside and the person who’s prepared to accept the responsibility of being on the inside and taking difficult decisions.

When I worked on the Third World debt campaign, we would say, “cancel the debt”. But if government had actually turned around and agreed, we would have said, “hold on, it’s more complicated than that”. There’s a type of work you do when you’re campaigning where you simplify things and say, this is where we need to get to; and there’s a type of work where you have to try and understand the complexity and move things along. I’ve never had a fear of being on both sides of that.

How important is science and technology?

It’s critically important. Without the insights of science we won’t be able to tackle major problems like climate change. But science and the translation of science into innovative business also provide the basis on which we can hope to be prosperous and competitive in the future.

Many scientists are concerned that the UK is moving away from basic science towards applied research.

I don’t think that’s true. As the person in charge of science within government, I intend to be a vigorous defender of the value of fundamental research. I think, though, that government needs to tackle a slightly different area: creating the right environment and culture around our research institutions and universities so that knowledge with a practical application isn’t left unexploited as purely a matter of intellectual interest.

“I intend to be a vigorous defender of the value of fundamental research”

After 91av ran an article recently in which a business leader argued that industry is short of trained graduates, we had a sackful of mail saying that if you pay scientists properly, they will come.

It’s a very important issue. We are doing some work on this, although we won’t have the results for several months. It is true that only 1 in 4 engineers that graduate work as an engineer. There are two ways of looking at that. One is that engineers are really good people to employ because they have a scientific background, they’re problem-solvers, they’re well organised. The other view is perhaps that if you want more engineers working as engineers, the labour market needs to offer the pay and conditions to attract people. I think you’ve opened up an important debate and it’s one that I’d like to continue.

You recently gave a speech in which you made the point that the government needs to listen to whether or not the public sees a benefit in new technologies.

The issue at the heart of that lecture was public understanding and engagement. The public being able to understand, firstly, what scientists do and don’t do, what the nature of science is, and, secondly, to be able to have a discussion with science, not just about the narrowest sense of the science but the ethical and moral implications of what people are proposing. That seems to me to be essential if we’re going to use science to handle the big challenges of our times.

You are a supporter of ID cards, and there has been a lot of talk about the fact that ID cards would never have stopped any of the terrorist acts that have happened in the UK. Are you listening enough to the public on issues like that?

What is important is to have an informed debate. What does science tell us, for example, about biometrics? When I was chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee we produced a which set out probably for the first time the choices that have to be made between false positives and false negatives if you use biometrics. Basically we found that if you want an absolutely secure system in banking to identify yourself, your bank will reject you sometimes, wrongly. Otherwise you’re not going to have such a secure system. That’s not a scientific choice; it’s a societal choice. And that is true whether you have ID cards or not. Now, the scientist cannot tell you where you should set the choice between a false positive and a false negative. The scientist can tell you how the technology would work, and then we as a society have got to decide those things.

But will ID cards actually help at all to stop terrorist acts? Or is there another reason for having them?

My view is that we increasingly need to have reliable systems of identity. That is partly because of crime, and terrorism is one form of crime; partly because of migration, partly because of the integrity of public services, partly because of the need to have secure access to financial information, partly because of the need to protect our own data, all of those sorts of issues. Whether or not you do ID cards, the demand to have more and more secure systems of identity is going to be a feature of the modern world. In my view, you then come to the conclusion that actually a properly organised ID card system, as long as it’s properly structured, as long as the data is held in the right way and so on, is the best way of doing that, and therefore will make a contribution to tackling all of these problems.

You used as a theme for your speech. Nowhere is the scientific ignorance that Snow described more apparent than among your fellow MPs and among civil servants. You have islands of scientists within a sea of economists, historians and politicians. How do you change that?

At the moment we’re not in a position where government automatically turns to scientists before we get into a public debate. I’m just being honest with you. But that process has begun. Don’t underestimate the achievement of getting chief scientific advisers into many government departments. They weren’t there a few years ago. That begins a process of embedding scientific advice and evidence into the heart of government decision-making.

One of the obstacles is that sometimes people think science will give you one choice, that it will say, “this is the answer to your problem”. Of course, science almost never does that. It can inform your decision but will rarely try to tell you there’s only one answer. If we could just get that understanding better in Whitehall, people would be more relaxed about going for scientific opinion.

In his essay, Snow makes the point that there are many apparently well-educated people who do not know the second law of thermodynamics. Do you know it?

I certainly have known it. I think that makes me reasonably well educated.