No one will now bring scientific scrutiny to the political decisions of the Commission, the body at the heart of European policy-making that affects half a billion citizens across 28 nations. The most senior European regulators and law-makers no longer have a link to the evidence base of the European research community.

What announced was the termination of the Bureau of European Policy Advisers, which provided the commission’s president, commissioners and directors-general with strategic advice. The chief scientific adviser role was based within this body. The replacement body Juncker proposes – the European Political Strategy Centre – does not include a similar science post.

The chief scientific adviser, working with scant resources and a lack of clarity, has only ever been a single thread rather than the many ropes that were needed. But the creation of the role was a recognition by policy-makers that science and evidence are tools for making better, more accountable policies. It was an aspiration, one which followed a series of directives that made little sense and were full of unintended consequences.

Generosity of spirit

Our science advocacy group Sense About Science began pushing for this role at the start of 2009, following discussions with environment commissioner Janez Potočnik’s team how longer-term improvements in scientific input could be made and how to mistakes could be caught before they became policy – for example the commission’s which inadvertently threatened the use of MRI scanners vital to modern medicine in its attempt to set occupational limits on exposure to electromagnetic fields.

In 2010, Commission president José Manuel Barroso announced the creation of the role and the first chief scientific adviser took up the job in January 2012.

Yes, next to other big influences in European policy-making – such as the formidable resources of commercial public affairs activity – the adviser role has been tiny. When the incumbent, became the first and possibly only adviser, she was surprised to find that her team was smaller than the one she had when she was chief scientific adviser for Scotland.

However, she has said the support and generosity of spirit shown by the research communities across Europe has made her role workable, if still difficult. In fact, Glover inspired that generosity, so much so that after just three years the research world came to believe that contributing to European policy-making was part of their responsibilities.

In the face of European policy challenges in energy, food production, pest and disease control and much else, this was a huge step forward. What a wasteful and regrettable situation that the new commission has now taken this step backwards.

WHEN it comes to issues such as consumer health and the environment, Europe and the US often appear to be on different planets. US farmers grow about 700,000 square kilometres of GM crops; Europe maintains something close to prohibition.

The US maintains that some endocrine-disrupting chemicals are safe; the European Union is seeking more restrictions. On these issues and more, the two blocs have come to different conclusions about how to balance risk, benefit and uncertainty. It makes trading difficult and this is something TTIP aims to resolve.

Europe’s approach is based on a “precautionary principle”. In a nutshell, that means new products and technologies are guilty until proven innocent.

Anti-TTIP campaigners have warned that this principle is under attack, with negotiators preparing to accept the US’s generally laxer rules, forcing Europeans to swallow weaker regulatory protection.

“Anti-TTIP protesters have warned that Europe’s precautionary principle is under attack”

This is not true. There are things to be wary about in TTIP, but its approach to risk regulation isn’t one of them.

First, the EU is not unique in using precaution in regulation – it just has a particular way of doing it. And both the EU and the US use precaution to block products, often for protectionist reasons.

For that reason, harmonisation makes sense. The beneficiaries can be more than the corporate bogeymen of anti-TTIP activism. Who, for example, would defend a return to the wasteful delays of separately run clinical trials?

TTIP is intended to focus on methods rather than conclusions about safety. It is a response to years of trade disputes where the EU and the US obdurately hit each other with conflicting scientific assessments. The negotiations are designed to put a stop to this: for the first time, EU and US authorities won’t oppose each other’s scientific evidence about safety but will develop ways to recognise “equivalent” standards of assessment.

So these negotiations won’t end up destroying the precautionary principle, but they could well challenge the fact that EU regulators use it without clear criteria or accountability. This has led to a patchwork of arbitrary decisions about what is tolerable.

For example, neonicotinoid pesticides, which may have some detrimental effect on bees, are banned, while habitat destruction, which has clear detrimental effects, is not. Under regulations for GM crops, assessors are only allowed to consider the risks; under chemical regulations they look at both risks and benefits. No one has explained why.

If the TTIP talks deliver clarity about how the precautionary principle will be applied, then we should welcome that as essential and overdue, whatever we think about trade liberalisation.

TTIP critics are right: there are a lot of closed doors in the EU that need to be opened. The inscrutability of its precautionary regulation is one of them.

Read more: “TTIP: The science of the US-European trade megadeal“

This article appeared in print under the headline “Rules for harmony”