Covid inquiry latest: Boris Johnson ‘clearly bamboozled’ by data, Patrick Vallance says

Sir Patrick expressed concern that only one in ten people in the civil service had science backgrounds. 

Only ten per cent of the individuals hired through the civil service’s graduate programme had STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) degrees, he said.

This was “striking” and led to the creation of a target for half of the civil service ‘fast stream’ to have STEM backgrounds by 2024.

Sir Patrick said it “destined the civil service to stay in roughly the same position that it has been for some time”.

He said this skewed recruitment posed problems for how science was raised and considered in the civil service.

“Ninety per cent was arts, humanities, social science degrees and only 10 per cent was a STEM degree,” Sir Patrick said. 

He added: “It means that the routine consideration of science in policy formulation was not where it needed to be.”

It formed part of the “science capability review”, an exercise conducted with Jeremy Heywood, the then Cabinet Secretary, to see if science capability was “adequate” in Government.