Just weeks after leaving the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, Prof Paul Monks says his five years as a chief scientific adviser have left him with the conviction that “science, in many respects, and the way that it deals with policy, has got to be more pragmatic and less idealistic”.
When he joined the civil service in 2020, “I kind of thought I knew how science and government worked,” he tells CSW. By that time, he had spent 10 years chairing the Air Quality Expert Group that advises the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and had gone on to co-chair Defra’s Science Advisory Council under Sir Ian Boyd, its chief scientific adviser at the time. “And then you get let inside the barbed-wire fence and you realise it’s completely different.”
The main difference? Being able to explore ideas more freely. “As government is formulating policy, it doesn’t really want to formulate that in the public eye. We’ve now got this 24-hour, 365 news cycle. So it wants to be able to think a little bit – rightly in my view – about what the options are,” he says. Leaks and “cheap stories” with little substance have, he says, made departments “slightly less willing to air their working”.
And within government, “you also get to understand what the political imperative is a little bit more clearly”, he says. This is where pragmatism comes in. “Often, our job as scientists is to be slightly idealistic. I realised that science had a particular role to play in the policymaking process, but it was just one of the voices [contributing],” Monks says.
He describes himself as a “big fan of evidence-informed policymaking” rather than evidence-based policymaking, which he says “often becomes quite prescriptive”. “Politics isn’t a science, frankly, and is, in many instances, the art of putting apples and oranges together… our job is to produce the best advice, but at the end of the day, it’s for ministers to decide against all the facts,” he adds.
“You have to check the ego at the door. Academia is, in some sense, a lot about self, isn’t it? It’s a lot about being the professor of this and being the best in this,” adds Monks, who is a professor of atmospheric chemistry and Earth observation science at the University of Leicester. “In government, it’s not; it’s making a difference for the greater good. It’s not about you.”
In many cases, he says, his greatest strength was not deep subject-matter knowledge but “bringing the scientific method to policy thinking. It was often that the way a scientist takes apart a problem is very different to somebody who’s trained in a different way. And often, our value was saying: ‘Well, have you thought about it like this? Does it really work like that?’”
One of the last tasks the former chief scientific adviser completed at DESNZ was publishing areas of research interest for the clean energy superpower mission. The document maps out important areas where R&D is needed and the departments responsible for each area, such as energy system infrastructure, integration and flexibility; heat and buildings; transport; and agriculture and land use.
The document also sets out priority R&D challenges for the two pillars of the mission: delivering at least 95% of electricity generated from low‑carbon sources by 2030; and reaching net zero by 2050. It asks questions such as how AI and digital tools can help to reduce the need for peak-time gas generation; and how transitioning to a circular economy and enabling electrification of key sectors – industry, buildings and transport – can help reduce emissions and waste.
The cross-government document is aimed not only at government departments, but also agencies, funders, arm’s-length bodies and regulators, including organisations such as the Met Office and Ofgem. The priorities have been picked up by the R&D Missions Acceleration Programme in the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, a £500m initiative to fast-track research and innovations aligned with the missions.
Typically, departments publish their own ARIs each year – but the decision to come up with a mission-focused list instead was a deliberate one. “Why is that important? Because it tries, essentially, for a bigger outcome,” Monks says. Expecting departments to work in silos on their priority areas would be “stupid”, he says with a laugh. “It’s a systems problem.” He says the missions approach “provides focus”.
How optimistic is Monks about the future of the mission – and what does he consider its biggest threats? He says the climate goals are “stretching”, but adds that mission head Chris Stark and the central Mission Delivery Unit are “very focused”.
“I think the challenge is always: How fast, how far?” he says. “Part of the issue is getting it wrapped in geopolitics. Because [net zero is] not a moral crusade; it’s about making sure that it sits in the right portfolio of energy security, economic growth, industrial competitiveness, healthcare, defence – that it’s the right balance within that basket of priorities.”
“You have to check the ego at the door. Academia is a lot about self. In government, it’s not about you”
Then there is the challenge of the energy “trilemma”: “At any given time, energy has to be affordable, reliable, sustainable – you’re balancing those three factors.” Renewable sources have the potential to drive energy costs down as well as cutting carbon; but any innovations must preserve energy security. Monks sees a clear imperative to invest in renewables and green technology because they have become “absolutely dominant as a global force”. “I think the government is right to be saying: ‘Can we make sure that we’ve got our fair share of those industries of tomorrow?’ To do that, you have to be active in this market,” he says.
In his five years in government – first at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and then in its successor department DESNZ – Monks served six secretaries of state under four prime ministers. But while ministerial churn can often lead to policy priorities getting lost in the shuffle, he says there was “one constant… [which] was the usefulness of science to be able to support the development and delivery of policy”.
Energy security and net zero is a “long-term policy game”, Monks adds. “These are national endeavours, for want of a better word. So, in some senses, the direction is set. I’m a huge fan of the civil service. I think it does an incredible job. I say that now as a former member of it, but I think that it has very good resilience to be able to deal with that sort of change.”
As DESNZ’s top scientist, Monks contributed evidence to a huge range of policy areas, from carbon capture and storage, climate change, nuclear fusion and fission, to the Cop summits. Ultimately, he saw it as his role to “make things slightly better than they could have been”. And looking back on his five-year term, he can point to instances where “things turned out substantially better” thanks to scientific input. One such example was leading the effort to set up the UK Critical Minerals Intelligence Centre in 2022 and chairing the expert group – which included scientists, NGOs and mining companies – that advised the government on its first critical minerals strategy.
“That allowed us to get that critical voice into the initial strategy,” he says. With a new strategy expected soon, the structures Monks helped put in place will ensure government continues to receive expert input. And he thinks back to his work on Covid in the months after he joined the civil service, between the 2020 summer and winter waves and “when the science was uncertain”. “I remember writing advice on mask-wearing on the steering wheel of my car on 23 December, because we needed to get advice out,” he says.
The following spring brought the Events Research Programme, which gathered evidence on whether it was safe to open events following the Covid lockdowns – “one of the most brilliant things I’ve ever done”. Monks coordinated the science board with the culture department’s then-chief scientist Tom Rodden for the programme, which was unlike anything he had done before, having been used to years-long research projects.
“We literally did it all in six weeks,” he says. The programme ran a series of pilot events, including the World Snooker Championships in Sheffield, the FA Cup semi-final and final at Wembley Stadium (which Leicester City, his team, won), and Download Festival in Leicestershire. It concluded that the risk associated with attending events depended largely on attendees’ behaviour beforehand and afterwards – on public transport, while socialising on site, and celebrating afterwards.
“That allowed the government to think about opening these events safely and more effectively, more quickly. The cultural aspect of this is quite an important part of wellbeing, so it was an important programme,” Monks says. “We found, interestingly, that if you don’t want to catch Covid, golf is the best thing to go and watch – if you don’t die of boredom,” he quips. That’s not only because the sport takes place outside, but also because fans don’t tend to visit pubs beforehand.
“I think the government is right to be saying: ‘Can we make sure that we’ve got our fair share of those industries of tomorrow?’”
Monks has spoken recently about his “Damascene conversion” on artificial intelligence. He says he used to describe the Large Language Models – like ChatGPT and Gemini – as “nothing but stochastic parrots” that “just repeat back to you what you already know”. “I thought, ‘Oh yes, yes, there’s nothing to see here’... And then I began to see really incredible things coming out of the world of AI,” he says.
One intervention that changed his mind was visiting The Alan Turing Institute – the UK’s national institute for data science and artificial intelligence – and watching demonstrations about how AI could affect public service delivery. Another was running a programme of seminars in DESNZ engaging with the energy sector on how AI could help better and cheaper delivery of energy for customers. So the former sceptic set up an AI committee in DESNZ to monitor opportunities and threats from AI to the energy system. He says then-prime minister Rishi Sunak was “right” to focus on the issue.
“I do think that AI will change the British industrial landscape. And those sound like very big words, but I can see it in my work at the moment with the Henry Royce Institute,” he says. Since becoming chair of the UK’s national institute for advanced materials research and innovation in September, Monks has seen how much of the design for manufacturing can be done in “digital foundries” and exported directly to machines in a factory.
Much as he sees an imperative for the UK to embrace green technologies, Monks says “we have to grasp the opportunity” AI presents for the economy. “Because if we don’t, we won’t get jobs. We’re a service economy in the main, so we’ve got to particularly be cognisant of how that’s going to change the service-based elements of our economy,” he explains. And AI will “revolutionise medicine”, he says. “Because what’s medicine about? Spotting patterns. And if you can do triage – for the 111 service, for example – without having to phone somebody up and get them to read questions out to you, why not?”
How can Monks see AI being useful in government? One area is consultations: “You get 1,000 responses. What’s AI really good at doing? Summarising. It can help and smooth a lot of processes.”
He says he can also see AI assistants taking some of the admin work off civil servants’ plates, leaving them to concentrate on their core tasks. “I think it will lead to great efficiency, but it will also increase the quality and impact of the work that you’re able to do,” he says.
He experienced something similar when he got a secretary for the first time: “My work didn’t change, but the quality of work did.” He is hopeful that AI can help make public service delivery more efficient – something that is critical as financial pressures bite. He gives a recent example from his own life, when he used a chatbot to help resolve an issue with his bank, saving a time-consuming phone call. He stresses the importance of ensuring groups such as older people and those with limited access to digital technologies don’t get left behind: “We’ve got to not have a digital divide. We’ve got to make sure that we work with people who are socially disadvantaged. We’ve got to not create a new inequality around digital; we’ve got to support people through that transition. But also, I think in doing that, we’ll make a digital-ready workforce.”
After all the talk of net zero, CSW has to address the elephant in the room: the increasingly widespread and vocal criticism of AI tools for the huge amounts of resources taken to power the datacentres they need to function. Monks takes a glass-half-full view. While he acknowledges that the more widespread use of AI will mean using more computing resource, he thinks the datacentres “don’t have to be part of the problem”.
“Nobody’s interested, frankly, in burning vast amounts of energy in these datacentres – so it’s all about energy efficiency,” he says. “I don’t think we’re using particularly energy-efficient technology at the moment,” he adds – noting that the graphics processing units used for generative AI were designed for home gaming consoles rather than large-scale image creation. One avenue being explored is “distilled AI” models, in which large, powerful models are used to train smaller ones. “Once those models are computed, they’re quite efficient and can be quite small,” Monks says.
“There’s also a big debate about whether you’re going to do edge compute or central compute – [in other words] will you compute it in your Alexa or a datacentre?” He says the “wild card on the AI horizon” is image processing and animation, which use huge amounts of processing power. But he feels optimistic that datacentres could be powered in a greener way, and about efforts to re-use the heat they generate. “Right place, right time, right size” is how he sums up a successful approach.
Having left government, Monks has plenty to keep him busy. As well as his posts at the University of Leicester and Henry Royce Institute, he chairs the British Geological Survey and is a science trustee for the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology. He is also non-executive director of one of the High Value Manufacturing Catapults – part of a network of R&D centres supported by Innovate UK to accelerate the commercialisation of innovative products and processes.
In the next stage of his career, he says he wants “to use the knowledge and the big-picture thinking that you get from working in government to make a difference to science and engineering and its outcomes”. He says his time as a civil servant has “absolutely” changed his approach to his work. Working in government was “like working in a hair dryer”, he says. “My life was diaried within a minute of its existence; you’re dealing with vast volumes of information. And so you learn a lot about how to take it up a level – to a strategic level – to affect outcomes.
“I think there’s something that you can then take out from that experience and say, ‘Well, how have you applied that approach in some of these other areas? Can it make a difference there as well?’ So that’s what I’m exploring with the organisations that I’m working with.”