Keywords

1 Introduction

The House of Commons select committees were introduced to the UK (UK) parliament in 1979 and have existed in the current form since the ‘Wright reforms’ of 2010 (see Russell & Grover 2017: 205–233). They exist alongside six permanent (and other ad hoc) House of Lords Committee and various bicameral joint committees in the overall parliamentary architecture. Within the Commons, select committees are thematically organised reflecting either the key competences of government and key ministerial functions (e.g. the Health and Social Care Committee), or on cross-cutting issues relating to parliamentary or governmental business (e.g. the Members’ Expenses Committee). The activities of the Commons select committees are overseen by the Liaison Committee, made up of each individual committee chair.

Commons select committees exhibit a high degree of independence from the machinery of government and opposition around which the Westminster system is structured. While the membership (usually totalling 11, but on occasion more to accommodate smaller parties) reflects the number of MPs each party has, the particular MPs occupying these positions are elected by ballots within their party groups. This may lead to experienced or interested individuals on a given topic but who diverge from their party line, taking up positions. Likewise, the Chairs of each committee are elected, with the number of Chairs allocated to each party again reflecting the balance of the Commons. This invests the Chairs not only with an independent democratic mandate, but also with a platform from which ambitious politicians outside government can establish their reputation in a specific policy area and their wider credentials for high office.

The committee system of the UK parliament differs from those in many other comparable democratic systems in that the legislative and executive scrutiny functions are split between different forums. Select committees do not play a role in the legislative process, which is overseen instead by ad hoc committees established for each Bill, whose membership reflecting the government majority in the Commons. The role of select committees is instead to monitor the activities of government by scrutinising issues of importance to both government and wider society (see, e.g., Benton & Russell, 2012; Geddes et al., 2018; Russell & Benton, 2011; Russell & Gover, 2017). Committees are able to appoint specialist advisors, hear evidence and produce reports, which solicit governmental responses, usually within two months of the publication of a report. Thus, their key function is that of knowledge generators and disseminators within parliament and the wider polity. Since select committees enjoy high levels of credibility, both amongst policy actors and the wider public, their reports represent potentially important and influential interventions within policy debates.

Yet relatively little attention has been paid to the governance mechanisms which oversee their activities. The main focus of the existing literature is on the role of such committees in holding governments to account as opposed to the mechanisms through which their own activities should be scrutinised (see, e.g., Benton & Russell, 2012). More recent studies have analysed the representativeness of witnesses called to give evidence before committees (Geddes, 2017), but wider analyses of the processes and oversight of committee enquiries remain rare. Given the very high degree of autonomy given to committees in terms of the focus (i.e. what to research), the conduct of their enquiries and the drafting of their reports and recommendations, this is an important gap in the literature. This is particularly the case where these issues are viewed in light of the now extensive literature on the corporate determinants of health and, most notably, the policy influencing strategies of the trans-national tobacco industry (Hurt et al., 2009). These include extensive and continually evolving efforts to influence scientific research and shape the evidentiary content of policy debates in ways designed to achieve favourable (or at least less unfavourable) regulatory environments for their products (Brandt, 2012).

Identifying, interpreting and synthesising evidence poses potentially significant the challenges for non-specialist MPs and committee staff in what are often complex and highly technical regulatory issues. The opaque governance structures and lines of accountability creates an opportunity for motivated and well-resourced policy actors, such as trans-national corporations, to be able to influence the outputs from such committees in ways amendable to their interest and policy objectives.

This chapter seeks to highlight these issues through the example of UK e-cigarette policy debates and the Commons Science & Technology Committee’s, 2018 enquiry into their regulation and use. We do not seek to identify the appropriate regulatory regime for e-cigarettes or to evaluate the underlying evidence in support of different policy regimes. Instead, we focus on what this contentious policy debate tells us about the politics and governance of evidence-informed policy within the Westminster system, and the potential opportunities which the select committee system affords policy actors to shape the evidential content of policy debates and potentially, therefore, regulatory outcomes. The issue of e-cigarettes was chosen since the questions raised here about select committee governance may be particularly relevant in contexts in which policy debates are framed in evidentiary terms, where evidence base is immature or contested and where key actors, like the tobacco sector, are excluded from other forms of engagement in the policy process (Hawkins & Ettelt, 2019). As such, the debate around a novel product such as e-cigarettes, and the role of the tobacco industry within this, provides an ideal context in which to explore these issues.

The chapter builds on previous studies of the ‘good governance’ of evidence, extending its focus to the role of select committees in the production, evaluation, synthesis and dissemination of policy-relevant evidence (Hawkins & Parkhurst, 2016; Parkhurst & Abeysinghe, 2016). It seeks also to expand the literature on the commercial determinants of health (Mialon, 2020) and to add additional insights into the evidence management component corporate political strategies (Brandt, 2012). Our analysis here has implications for our understanding of the governance of evidence within policy-making processes, and the role and oversight of parliamentary committees, in both the UK and in other contexts and will be of particular relevance for understanding the evidentiary content of e-cigarette policy debates in various policy settings.

2 Select Committees’ Impact on Policy

Despite scepticism about the importance of parliament as a policy actor in the Westminster polity (King & Crewe, 2014), both parliament (Russell & Cowley, 2016) and parliamentary committees (Hindmoor et al., 2009; Russell & Benton, 2011) have been identified as important components within the policy system, and there is a limited but growing literature on their policy impact. Russell and Benton (2011) studied the work of 7 House of Commons select committees between 1997 and 2010, tracing the passage of recommendations from committee enquiry reports into policy and identifying less tangible forms of influence. Overall, they found select committee influence is significant with around 40% of recommendations taken up by government and implemented and smaller changes and requests for information disclosure even more likely to be accepted (see also Russell & Gover, 2017; Yowell, 2012). Hindmoor et al. (2009) found that 20 out of 93 proposals in government education bills demonstrated similarities with proposals emanating from the Education Select Committee. Perhaps counter-intuitively, recommendations from committees with opposition Chairs were more likely to be taken on board, reflecting the efforts made by these actors to foster cross-party consensus for their proposals. Indeed, the cross-party nature of select committees is identified as a key source of the authority and influence over policy-makers (Russell & Gover, 2017). Similarly, it is often backbench MPs, as opposed to members of the government, who take up select committee reports and act as a conduit for their impact on government (Russell & Gover, 2017). In a small number of cases—around 5% of reports—select committees are asked to undertake pre-legislative scrutiny of draft legislation. While select committees cannot amend bills formally, existing studies have found evidence of committee impact on the resulting legislation (see Mulley & Kinghorn, 2016; Smookler, 2006).

However, conceptualising influence in narrow, transactional and quantitative terms, focussing solely on traceable recommendations in formal policy documents, misses both the myriad forms which policy-making takes and the complex and nuanced ways in which influence may occur (see Benton & Russell, 2012). Committee influence extends beyond uptake of recommendations in policy, with Russel and Benton (2011: 8) identifying seven more indirect or less readily quantifiable forms of committee influence: contributing to debate, drawing together evidence, spotlighting issues, brokering between actors in government, improving the quality of government decision-making through accountability, exposing failures and, perhaps most importantly, ‘generating fear’ about how things might look if examined by a select committee.

The latter represents an important mechanism of ‘soft power’ through which select committees can shape the thinking of government in the development of policy. Select committee outputs and members (particularly committee Chairs) are also identified as sources of authority in policy debates, for example, through references to their work in parliamentary debates and policy evaluation (see Russell & Gover, 2017). Both criticism and endorsement by select committees—whether anticipated or actual—can shape policy-makers’ behaviour. The latter may feel compelled to take committee Chairs seriously given their capacity to ‘make life difficult’ for government if they so choose (Russell & Gover, 2017: 228). Hawes (1992) identified how influence can be subtle and indirect and may take the form of simply raising the profile of a given policy issue: the ‘delayed drop’ effect, perhaps analogous to Carol Weiss’ (1979) enlightenment model of knowledge transfer and diffusion.

In addition to their function within parliament, select committees have become a prominent component of the policy space, with committee chairs enjoying an increasing media profile (Gaines et al., 2019). The generally favourable perception of their work (Gaines et al., 2019) means the activities of committees, including their hearings and evidence sessions, can be a means of promoting public as well as a parliamentary consciousness about policy issues and particular framings and accounts of these.

3 Select Committees as Evidence Synthesisers and Producers

Select committees are both consumers and producers of policy-relevant information and evidence within the Westminster system. They function as evidence gathering tools for parliamentarians (Geddes, 2020), while the reports and other documents they generate exist as independent, policy-relevant artefacts within the information environment. A small but emerging literature has begun to examine the processes through which parliamentary committees gather, interpret and synthesise information (Benton & Russell, 2012; Geddes, 2016, 2017, 2020), identifying common knowledge translation barriers (Geddes et al., 2018) and examining the type and representativeness of witnesses (Geddes, 2017). The tight timetables to which UK parliamentary committees work, and their geographical location, potentially skews inputs towards those who can be physically present in London (to give personal testimony) and/or who have the resources and expertise to be able respond to evidence calls at short notice and in forms most accessible to/likely to influence parliamentarians. Pedersen et al. (2015) found similar issues in a comparative study of Denmark, the Netherlands and the UK. Perhaps counter-intuitively, they identified that closed calls led to a wider variety of actors being involved and a more even distribution of evidence being received by the committee. Geddes et al. (2018) also highlight the value which parliamentarians place on ‘consensual knowledge’ and ‘generalised findings’ with clear policy relevance versus the more ‘cutting edge’ or ‘boundary pushing’ research which academics often seek to promote. Select committees thus emphasise breadth of evidence and notions of balance in their evidence gathering and reporting. This norm of inclusivity is likely to create a significant opportunity for well-resourced industry actors to feed into these processes.

While select committees may be perceived to be led by the evidence, in reality committees and MPs on them face a competing range of priorities, including political expediency and agendas as well as the ‘performative’ nature of committee hearings. This means there may be a trade-off between style and substance in selecting witnesses who will be able to engage and explain evidence to committee members (and their wider audience) (Geddes, 2019). Similarly, the desire to produce impactful reports and influence policy may shape the content of committee outputs given the types of information likely to be most impactful on fellow parliamentarians and the government.

The evidence produced by select committees, in terms of reports and the recommendations, is often highly regarded by ministers in relation to other sources of policy-relevant information. Bates and colleagues (2017: 783) argue that select committees are seen by policy actors as a ‘source of unbiased information, rational debate, and constructive ideas’ (see also Geddes, 2019). According to Benton and Russell (2012: 789), ministers may take recommendations from a committee more seriously than proposals from civil servants or outside groups, since committees apply ‘a political filter’ to the evidence collected and usually present reports on a unanimous cross-party basis. More generally, scholars agree that the form in which evidence is presented influences the likelihood that findings will be taken up by policy-makers, with researchers encouraged to present findings in accessible forms. Stevens (2010) found that outputs with clear, unequivocal findings represented in certain forms (i.e. ‘killer charts’) from which clear policy directions could be derived were often favoured over other types of evidence. This may sway policy actors towards outputs such as select committee reports over more equivocal and less readily accessible findings in the peer reviewed academic literature. If select committees are identified as important sources of clear, reliable, policy-relevant (and politically road-tested) evidence by policy-makers—able to influence the content of policy in the ways identified above—then assessing the quality of their evidentiary output, the processes through which it is produced and the mechanisms which oversee this, is of paramount importance to a policy science committed to effective, evidence-informed decision-making.

Select committees thus offer a potentially important point of contact and opportunity for knowledge exchangebetween legislators on the one hand, and researchers, experts and policy stakeholders on the other. However, key questions arise about who has access to these committees and the relative weight afforded to their inputs by members in their role as knowledge conduits for parliament as a whole. While, as noted above, the focus to date has been largely on the social make up of committee witnesses, it is necessary to focus not just on diversity and democratic representativeness, but on power politics and vested interests. Given the asymmetric resource distribution between different policy actors, for example, between trans-national corporations and civil society organisations, they may be able to obtain disproportionate access (and thus potential to influence) to committees. This is particularly important as corporations in certain sectors are increasingly positioning themselves as legitimate producers of policy-relevant evidence and participants in evidence evaluation processes. This potential conflict between democratic norms of inclusivity and those of scientific rigour and independence reflects the wider tensions within select committees between the desire to be led by the relevant evidence and the political realities of parliament and the priorities of individual committee members. This in turn raises important questions about the governance of select committees and the mechanisms in place to protect their procedures from capture by vested interests.

4 Select Committee Governance

Select committees are formally established, and their role set out, in House of Commons Standing Order 152. However, the governance mechanisms surrounding select committees depend to a large degree on convention and afford a high degree of autonomy to the membership, and particularly select committee Chairs, in deciding the focus of enquiries, the appointment of expert advisors, evidence collection and interpretation, and the drafting of reports and recommendations. Considering the salience given to select committee reports, questions arise about the basis on which these decisions are taken and the oversight mechanisms which govern them.

Parliamentarians often have long-term commitments to specific policy issues and in-depth understanding of the issues and actors involved in the areas of focus of their committees. However, given the potentially wide-ranging remit of a committee such as the Health and Social Care Select Committee, it is unrealistic that committee members will be equally conversant with every issue that may come before the committee or indeed demonstrate the same level of interest and engagement with each of these.

In addition, while select committee members may have specialist knowledge in a certain subject, it does not necessarily follow that they have the specialist skills to undertake all aspects of select committee including the collection, interpretation, synthesis and production of policy-relevant evidence involved in committee enquiries. This includes a range of relevant competence including the forensic interviewing or cross-examination skills required for the successful questioning of witnesses appearing before committees. This may be the lifeblood of the many barristers populating the House of Commons but may come less naturally to those from different professional backgrounds. Equally, most parliamentarians will have limited training in the methodological norms of conducting research in different disciplines and contexts. This includes an ability to assess the conflicts of interest which may affect some policy actors and sources of information with which the committee may be confronted. In this context, the clerks to the committee and the expert advisers will play an important role in guiding the work of the committee. However, while committee support staff may be able to advise and support MPs on these matters, the resources available to them and timescales for producing committee reports, mean they may able unable to search for and assess evidence in a way that would be considered systematic, exhaustive and robust by specialist researchers. While academic researchers do not have a monopoly on the production of legitimate, policy-relevant evidence, research outputs of different kinds and provenance nevertheless have a different epistemological status and must be handled appropriately in the context of policy deliberations.

5 Corporate Actors and Policy Influence

The inherently political nature of evidence use in (health) policy-making perhaps comes most obviously to the fore in contexts in which both the nature of the policy problem—and thus the objectives of government interventions—and the underlying evidence bases are highly contested. There is a long and well-documented history of tobacco industry attempts to shape regulation of their products and the policy-making process more generally (Apollonio & Bero, 2007; Cairney et al., 2011; Fooks et al., 2011; Hawkins et al., 2018; Hurt et al., 2009; Peeters et al., 2015; Savell et al., 2014; Smith et al., 2013). The release of internal tobacco industry documents into the public domain as a result of whistle-blower leaks and court-mandated document releases following litigation in the USA in the 1990s revealed the extent of industry attempts to shape the policy environment through political lobbying; financial donations to politicians, parties and agencies; and other influencing strategies (Hurt et al., 2009). A key component of industry strategy focussed on the development of an allegedly ‘reduced risk’ through innovations such as filtered cigarettes and lower tar products, which studies reveal to be no safer than conventional or preceding products (Gilmore & Peeters, 2013; Peeters & Gilmore, 2013, 2015). We refer to product development as the industry’s technological strategy.

In addition, trans-national tobacco corporations (TTCs) invested significant resources in the production and dissemination of scientific research related to their products and associated harms with the objective of influencing both public perceptions of the harmfulness of their products and the evidentiary content of regulatory debates (Bero, 2005; Brandt, 2012; Grüning et al., 2006; Muggli et al., 2001, 2003; Oreskes & Conway, 2014). We term this component of industry activities their epistemic strategy. A key component of their epistemic strategy centred on the funding of apparently independent researchers and the formation of front organisations (Apollonio & Bero, 2007), which offered the veneer of independence and scientific integrity to industry funded research (Cash et al., 2002) in order to shape the evidentiary content of policy deliberations and the wider information environment informing public debate. This strategy led Brandt (2012) to conclude that the tobacco industry practically invented the concept of (conflict of interest) COI in health policy research.

These now infamous examples of the tobacco industry placing narrow corporate interests over those of public health have led to unprecedented moves by tobacco control (and wider public health) researchers and advocates to press for regulation of the sale, marketing and consumption of tobacco products, culminating in the adoption of the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) (World Health Organization, 2003). In particular, Article 5.3 of the FCTC requires signatories to take active measures to protect public policies ‘from the commercial and vested interests of the tobacco industry’, leading to the effective exclusion of the tobacco industry from decision-making in many policy contexts (World Health Organization, 2003, 2008). Notwithstanding ongoing issues of implementation (Fooks et al., 2017; Hawkins & Holden, 2018), the TI’s ability to engage policy-makers or promote favourable research is limited by FCTC Article 5.3 (Malone, 2013; McKee & Allebeck, 2014).

These developments have led TTCs to evolve and seek new ways to advance their business objectives by adapting their epistemic and technological strategies, leading to an important symbiosis between these two strands of industry strategy. In terms of their technological strategy, TTCs have invested significantly in new nicotine delivery systems, particularly e-cigarettes but also heat not burn technology (Mathers et al., 2019). This has included the formation by TTCs of wholly owned subsidiary companies dedicated to their ‘next generation’ products. Investment in e-cigarettes has conferred significant benefits to the industry by blurring the edges of restrictions on advertising and promotion and undermining clear air legislation while maintaining nicotine dependence in users (MacKenzie & Hawkins, 2016). The emergence of e-cigarettes has fostered division within the tobacco control research and advocacy communities whose unity was a key factor in delivering previous policy successes (Gneiting, 2015). This has been particularly marked in the UK, which is a strategically important context for tobacco control debates (Gornall, 2015; Hawkins & Ettelt, 2019). In addition, attempts by TTCs to rebrand themselves as nicotine technology companies offer a pretext for engagement with policy-makers, circumnavigating FCTC restrictions on meetings with the tobacco industry TI and giving them a seat at the table for the development of regulatory responses to these novel products under the auspices of being technical experts. As will be discussed below, this includes using deliberation of e-cigarette policy as a means of engaging with parliamentarians in ways which would be deemed highly problematic in other areas of tobacco control.

Closely related to this, TTCs have sought to promote their technological strategy through funding and promoting research sympathetic to their new nicotine delivery devices and their favoured policy agenda. The most obvious manifestation of this strategy is the creation of the Philip Morris Foundation for a Smoke-Free World (FSFW), with an endowment of $1 billion. The conflict of interest associated with this is reflected in the decision by researchers and institutions, including the authors’ own employer, not to accept funding from the FSFW and to enact policies of non-engagement with a tobacco industry body (Piot, 2018), as well as the decision by leading scientific journals to refuse to publish tobacco industry funded research (Cohen et al., 2017). However, strategies to promote e-cigarettes have not been limited to this global initiative. A number of industry friendly e-cigarette conferences and events have been established and have succeeded in developing networks amongst prominent and highly regarded scholars in the field of public health (Hawkins & Gornall, 2015; Lee, 2013).

6 UK E-cigarette Policy and the Science and Technology Committee Enquiry

Previous studies of UK e-cigarettes policy have identified a strong rhetorical commitment to evidence based (or evidence informed) policy-making within a policy context characterised by an absence of robust, policy-relevant evidence (Ettelt & Hawkins, 2018; Hawkins & Ettelt, 2019). The still limited, but rapidly expanding, evidence-base on the health effects of e-cigarettes, and thus the appropriate policy regime which should apply to them, remains highly contested (Newman, 2019). In keeping with this, governments countries across the globe have taken greatly differing regulatory approaches to e-cigarettes (Campus et al., 2021).

In the UK, significant divisions emerged within the tobacco control and public health communities between e-cigarette proponents and sceptics (Hawkins & Ettelt, 2019). Although recent studies identify the existence of a sizeable ‘middle ground’ of policy actors with still evolving or undecided positions of different aspects of e-cigarette regulation, these sit between the more sedimented and ardent bodies of opinion at either end of the spectrum (Smith et al., 2021). These cleavages have been exacerbated by the increasing presence of the global tobacco industry within the e-cigarette sector (Mathers et al., 2019), and the controversy arising from their potential engagement in policy-making and implementation in this context despite the limitations placed on this by Article 5.3 of the FCTC. No significant divergences in approach were identified between the main political parties on this topic and much of the debate centred instead of the research and public health communities.

Debates between the ‘pro’ and ‘anti’ e-cigarette camps are often articulated in terms of a failure of the other side to recognise ‘the evidence’ and the policy regimes that follow from this (Hawkins & Ettelt, 2019). However, this misrecognises the fundamentally political nature of the policy process and the function of evidence within it. Arguments which purport to be about facts are often actually arguments about competing values, ideologies and political priorities (Stone, 1997). Consequently, the ability to shape the information environment in which policy debates are conducted becomes a powerful means for policy advocates to achieve their desired outcomes. This includes the public health actors identified above, but also other vested interests such as the tobacco industry which has a well-documented history of attempting to influence scientific research and evidence related to the regulation of its products industry actors in a variety of ways.

As noted above, UK e-cigarette policy has been framed principally in terms of evidence and competing claims about what constitutes an evidence-based approach. Consequently, debates have evolved principally through the production, identification and promotion of new evidence supportive of policy advocates’ favoured position. Most notably, Public Health England (PHE) commissioned an evidence review, the findings of which are often reduced to the claim that e-cigarettes are ‘95% safer’ than conventional tobacco products (McNeill et al., 2015). However, this widely repeated figure has been consistently challenged in other quarters (Fairchild et al., 2019; McKee, 2019).

Subsequently, the UK Parliament’s Science and Technology Committee (STC) opened an enquiry into e-cigarettes with a call for written evidence published in October 2017 setting the deadline for submissions as the 8 December that year. This was followed by 5 oral evidence sessions between January and May 2018. The resulting report was published in August 2018. The UK Government published its response to the report in December 2018, which accepted the main recommendations of the report (Science & Technology Committee, 2018). In keeping with PHE’s report, the STC adopted a largely positive framing of the health impact of e-cigarettes, arguing in favour of a less restrictive regulatory model and appeared to prioritise the potential of e-cigarettes as smoking cessations aids over concerns about their wider effects on population health, including their gateway effect on non-smokers and the possibility that dual use may actually undermine quit attempts. In addition, the report called into question the rationale for bans on their use in various public spaces in order to facilitate e-cigarette uptake amongst a greater number of smokers and lead to reduction in smoking rates. The report does not advocate a reversal of bans on vaping in all public spaces, calling instead for a debate on this subject as a prelude to possible policy change. However, it implies that current exclusions are unjustifiable on the basis of evidence about the relative harms if vapour and cigarette smoke (Paragraph 60). The report does, however, call more clearly for a repeal of such bans in mental health facilitates—arguing the default should be for vaping to be permitted (Paragraph 57)—and raises the potential of their use being facilitated in the prison estate (Paragraphs 53, 54). While the report acknowledges the ‘uncertainty about long-term effects’ of e-cigarettes—and in a specific section of the report under that heading—this was presented in equivocal terms in which it was explicitly and repeatedly argued that any potential risks to users must be offset again the risks of harms associated with not promoting e-cigarettes as quit aids (Paragraph 29).

The approach to e-cigarettes exemplified by this report has been criticised by some public health actors for failing to sufficiently reflect the equivocal nature of the research evidence on both the effectiveness of e-cigarettes in smoking cassations and on their potentially adverse health effects (Lancet, 2018; cf. Lamb, 2019). Others, meanwhile, have highlighted that this approach to e-cigarettes, and the framing of the policy debate more generally, is seemingly at odds with the consensus towards a more precautionary approach adopted by regulators beyond the UK (Campus et al., 2021; McKee, 2019). Thus, while e-cigarettes may be useful quit aids for some smokers, offering an additional option in the smoking cessation toolkit, it is at least open to doubt, on the basis of current evidence, that they are the ‘disruptive technology’ or game changer for smoking cessation which industry actors and other advocates claim they are. Moreover, we are simply unable on the basis of current evidence to accurately assess the long-term health effects of such a novel product, only recently entering into use.

The tone of the STC report, while in keeping with the tenor of much of the UK debate, raises a number of questions about the provenance and conduct of the enquiry. Firstly, how and why was it decided to hold the enquiry when it was? How were the terms of reference for the enquiry and the parameters for the call for evidence set? Were independent expert advisors appointed to oversee the enquiry and, if so, through what process? How was it decided who should be called to give oral evidence? How were evidence submissions and testimony analysed and the expertise and credibility of the respondents evaluated? How was the report drafted and reviewed? How were any disagreements about the content of the report (if any) managed and the final text agreed? All of these issues are central to understanding the governance of the enquiry and thus the way in which the report should be interpreted and used.

Perhaps the questions of greatest concern arise about the way in which the STC sought to comply with Article 5.3 of the FCTC and how decisions were taken to take evidence, in both written and oral forms, from TTCs. Of a total of 25 witnesses who gave evidence to the STC e-cigarette enquiry four were from TTCs and/or their e-cigarette subsidiaries and two more were from the e-cigarette trade associations, including one with TTC members meaning almost 25% of oral testimony came from industry actors and 20% from the tobacco industry or TTC-associated bodies. There is an obvious tension between the desire of select committees’ desire to gain a comprehensive range of perspectives, on the one hand, and their obligation to adhere to the UK’s international commitments, on the other. Moreover, there is some debate about whether engagement with tobacco companies in the capacity as e-cigarette producers or with e-cigarette companies largely or wholly owned by TTCs falls within the remit of Article 5.3. Yet the degree of access gained by the tobacco sector is noteworthy in any instance. How did the committee decide to afford such a large percentage of the time for oral evidence to these actors? How did they interpret their responses and what emphasis did they place on these? Did the committee differentiate between TTCs, their e-cigarette subsidiaries and associations, and independent e-cigarette companies? Given the ongoing commitment of TTCs to their core combustible nicotine products, and their robust defence their right to sell and market these across the globe, this type of engagement with tobacco industry actors represents a potential conflict of interest.

The case of the e-cigarettes enquiry thus raises important questions about the interpretation and implementation of the FCTC and how to define and engage with the modern, evolving tobacco industry which is now heavily invested not only in the nicotine technology’ sector but is now moving into the pharmaceutical sector with the purchase by Philip Morris International (PMI) of the UK based company Vectura, which specialises in inhaled medications. The potential synergies for PMI, but also the conflicts of interests to which this move gives rise, warrant scrutiny and may be indicative of wider strategic objectives of the sector.

7 Conclusion

The political standing of select committees and their opaque accountability mechanisms create a significant opportunity for advocates seeking to influence the content of regulation to influence policy debates. Given select committees’ wish to solicit evidence from a wide range of stakeholders, corporate actors may be able to gain access in the policy process and to shape the evidence and information environment within which policy is scrutinised. The kudos enjoyed by select committees and their effectiveness in influencing policy makes them potentially important targets for the epistemic strategies of corporate political actors. This may be particularly the case in policy-making contexts with long-standing, established commitments to ‘evidence-based policy’ such as the UK, and on policy issues about which the relevant body of research remains limited and/ or contested, as is the case with e-cigarette regulation.

The role of health-harming industries such as the tobacco industry in shaping policy has been well documented in health policy (Hurt et al., 2009) and in other sectors (see Kenworthy et al., 2016). A key component of corporate political strategy is to shape the information environment in which policies are made via the funding, conduct and promotion of research (Brandt, 2012; McCambridge et al., 2018). Given the resources available to such corporations they are able to engage in all aspects and stages of the policy process. Studies of the tobacco (Apollonio & Bero, 2007) and other industries (Hawkins & McCambridge, 2014; McCambridge & Mialon, 2018; McCambridge et al., 2013) identify a long-standing strategy of seeking to ‘capture’ (Katz, 2015) apparently independent bodies to produce research amenable to their underlying policy objectives. Such outputs enjoy the added benefit of both disassociation with the industry and the credibility associated with established bodies at the heart of the body politic. TTCs, excluded from many aspects of the policy process as a result of the FCTC, have consistently sought to identify new ways to influence policy and new forums in which to engage government. Most recently their investment in e-cigarettes has offered them a novel pretext for meeting with policy-makers in their guise as the nicotine technology industry in ways previously precluded by the FCTC.

While there is no suggestion that any of the actors involved in the conduct of the STC enquiry were compromised in any way, they received submissions and took evidence from a number of tobacco industry actors. This demonstrates the way in which select enquiries offer controversial industries a forum for engagement with decision-makers, which is a potentially powerful component of corporate political strategy (Baron, 1995) and raises important questions about the oversight of evidence production by government bodies. It is vital to understand how evidence is produced, managed and evaluated within these bodies. Who is able to submit written evidence? Who gets called to testify in person? How is the expertise of different respondents evaluated and their inputs emphasised or ignored? What is the relative weight given to written versus oral evidence?

This chapter argues that there is currently a lack of clearly defined governance mechanisms and lines of accountability surrounding the work of UK parliamentary select committees. There is a tacit understanding amongst policy scholars that the function and character of select committees are to think independently and to hold government to account. Yet we have little understanding of the mechanisms which are in place, or should be established, to oversee the conduct of the committees’ own work. This creates a ‘regulatory vacuum’ in which the best resourced policy advocates are potentially able to shape the framing development of key policy debates and processes by influencing the work of select committees. The current gap in the research literature is a particularly pressing concern given the highly sophisticated and rapidly evolving strategies of corporate political actors in health-harming industries such as tobacco to maintain their influence in increasingly hostile regulatory environments.