Alexandra Freeman’s career has already taken one sharp turn: After 16 years as an award-winning science journalist at BBC, in 2016 she moved to academia, where she worked on improving public understanding of risk and evidence, as well as reforming scientific publishing to address skewed incentives in research. Now, she is moving again—this time into the House of Lords, the United Kingdom’s unelected upper legislative chamber that scrutinizes, amends, and approves proposed legislation.
Freeman’s appointment, announced on 7 May, was made through a little-known process in which any British, Irish, or Commonwealth citizen living in the U.K. can apply to become a lifetime peer of the House of Lords, sitting as a “crossbencher” unaffiliated with any political party. These positions are rare—the House of Lords Appointments Commission has chosen just 13 peers like Freeman in the past decade—and are meant for those who can bring specific expertise to the chamber. (The commission also announced it is appointing University of Oxford engineer Lionel Tarassenko, an expert in the use of machine learning in health care.) Most of the 786 peers are appointed by the prime minister or a political party, or inherit their titles from their families.
As Freeman prepares to join the chamber and become a baroness (of where, she has yet to decide) she is wrapping up her work as the former director of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at the University of Cambridge, where she has helped journalists, lawyers, and doctors better understand and communicate uncertainty. She plans to continue her work at Octopus, an experimental publishing platform that allows researchers to publish more comprehensive records of their work—from detailed methods to analyses—than a traditional journal allows. ScienceInsider spoke this week with Freeman about her plans for her new role, which will begin after a range of legal and ceremonial formalities. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Q: What made you decide to apply for appointment to the House of Lords?
A: I was listening to the radio and I heard somebody from the House of Lords talking about the previous interviewee and saying, “We really need more people like that, who can get their head around scientific evidence as crossbenchers. I must make sure that more people apply for these positions.” So I looked it up and found that there are two appointments a year that you can apply for to be a completely apolitical expert in anything. And there aren’t that many scientists. I thought that sounded like an amazing fit for what I want to do. I was looking for something where I could work in public service, but not have to deal with the party politics.
Q: What was the application process like?
A: I put in an application and then didn’t hear anything for about 18 months, so I thought the application had just gone straight in the bin. And then I heard at the beginning of this year that I’d been invited to interview, which was one of those moments where you see an email and you go, “What?!”
Q: After the interview process, how did you learn that you’d been made a peer?
A: I got one of those lovely phone calls, on a Friday afternoon. I was just here doing my work at home. But I wasn’t allowed to tell anyone. I haven’t had a chance to celebrate yet.
Q: Why did you feel you would be right for the role?
A: A lot of my training, especially in my career as a documentarymaker, was about taking in scientific information and evidence, interviewing experts about it, getting to grips with that. And then my more recent work in evidence communication is about trying to help people make decisions on the basis of evidence.
Q: How do you see those skills being useful in the House of Lords?
A: Every day, you are having evidence presented to you, and you are trying to take that in, trying to understand the pros and cons, who’s going to be a winner and a loser from this policy. Being able to ask those questions—how will that affect this subgroup of people? What will the benefits be? What will the harms to some people be?—I would like to be able to help express those to the house to help decision-making.
Q: When you announced your appointment on X (formerly Twitter), you said, “I live by the mantra that if there are things that need changing, work to change them. And I intend to work hard!” What issues were you alluding to?
A: I wasn’t alluding to anything specific. But I don’t want to stick with status quo—I always look at things and think, “what’s the best way to do this?” not “what’s the way it’s always been done?” So I guess I was thinking of things like Octopus, where we shouldn’t just be trying to put small sticking plasters over the problems; we need to look at the root causes of the problems and try and change things from the base.
Q: What are your thoughts on how evidence and uncertainty are currently handled in the House of Lords?
A: I think the committees [small groups of members who conduct detailed inquiries to guide policy decisions] do a really good job of questioning, synthesizing, dealing with uncertainties. I would really like to try and help get that work better known, so that we can all hear from the experts about what’s going on in engineering, biology, or ultraprocessed food, or any of these inquiries that are going on at the moment.
Within the floor of the House, it’s much more difficult because you’ve got such a broad range of expertise and people, and you only get a short bit of time to speak—it’s quite a stilted way of communicating. There isn’t real time fact checking or anything like that going on. And I think that can be problematic.
Q: Will you continue being so outspoken?
A: Oh yes—the whole point of being an independent member of the House of Lords is to be able to be outspoken. You’re there to be able to have an opinion that’s not policed by any political party or anybody.
More: https://www.science.org/content/article/scientist-asked-join-u-k-house-lords-and-got
