Revealed: The minister who 'wasted' millions
that the government minister who "wasted" millions on a ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Office evaluation that couldn't possibly evaluate anything was the current Defence Secretary
Bob Ainsworth.
Academic advisers say they had tried to make it clear the research was pointless.
Professor Sheila Bird was one of three academics who'd been asked to make sure the research was robust. In an e-mail to me, she tells me how she regrets not doing more to prevent what she describes as a "waste of public funds".
"My regret is that I/we thought the decision-making so obvious = NOT to go ahead that we did not assiduously follow-up to ensure that the OBVIOUS decision was actually made! Instead, we thought that we'd headed off the waste of public funds by sound analysis. How naive . . . mea culpa."
that Professor Bird and her colleagues delivered to ministers back in October 2002, before the evaluation got underway, explains what they'd been asked to do:
"In the summer of 2002 the Blueprint project team of the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Office commissioned us to provide advice on the design and sample size requirements for an evaluation of the effectiveness of a new drugs education intervention to be delivered in local-authority schools in England. The proposed intervention was to be modelled on the STAR project that had been evaluated favourably in the Mid-West of the USA."
Ministers clearly hoped that they could introduce a version of the successful American STAR project in England and Wales and the research people would show what a brilliant decision it had been.
However, the advice was gloomy. 
So the model for the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Office's new drugs prevention scheme was not all it was cracked up to be. But the academic advisers had more bad news for Mr Ainsworth.
In other words, the likely impact of introducing the new approach was so small that it would take a big evaluation to notice any difference. The budget for the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Office evaluation only allowed for the involvement of 23 schools in four areas of England with another six local schools acting as a control. Not nearly enough.
And even if they did go for a big sample, it was unlikely the project would yield the kind of headline-grabbing success hoped for. The academics reckoned that, "realistically", the "effect-size" would be in the order of 0.06%.
Mr Ainsworth has so far been unavailable for comment. I am trying to imagine his reaction to all of this. His favoured prevention model had been criticised as over-hyped. And demonstrating its impact would be a hard sell, to say the least.
The advice from the academics could hardly have been clearer:
But, as we now know, Mr Ainsworth ignored the advisory panel and went ahead with the multi-million pound evaluation.
He didn't mention the warnings from the academics when a month later that US preventions programmes "with the greatest impact on behaviour" provided the "evidence" for the Blueprint research programme.
The evaluation, he said, would: "determine whether elements of US 'what works' programmes: (1) can be implemented within the UK settings; (2) have potential to be effective in reducing drug use, and (3) have added value for schools, parents and young people".
Mr Ainsworth in his current role as defence secretary presides over a research budget of some £439 million. Earlier this month he agreed to slash MoD funding for research by £100m.
I'm 
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