Baroness Alexandra Freeman of Steventon, British science communicator, life peer, and former television producer. Previously, she worked from 2000 to 2016 for the BBC. As a producer or director, she was involved in Walking with Beasts, Life in the Undergrowth, Bang Goes the Theory, Climate Change by Numbers, and Trust Me, I'm a Doctor.
In 2016, Freeman joined the University of Cambridge as executive director of the Winton Center for Risk and Evidence Communication in the Faculty of Mathematics. She was appointed a non-party political life peer by the House of Lords Appointments Commission in May of 2024 and has served as a crossbench member of the House of Lords since then.
Her maiden speech in the House of Lords occurred during a take-note debate on science and technology contributions to the UK economy. Most recently, she was elected the next principal of Hertford College, Oxford, in November of 2025.
Episode Description
When you think about science’s contribution to society, do you think first about new inventions with an immediate economic benefit? What about scientific advances that deliver enormous societal or environmental benefits—but whose economic value may not be immediate or easily measured? How can these latter advances be evaluated? What is the role of governments in recognizing and promoting these advances? That’s the focus of this episode with guest Alexandra Freeman.
Full Transcript
John Bailer
When you think about the contribution of science to society, do you think about new inventions that have immediate, direct economic—sorry, starting again.
When you think about the contribution of science to society, do you think about new inventions that have some immediate, direct economic benefit? But what about science contributions that have direct societal or environmental benefit, but with no clear direct economic benefit, at least initially, particularly contributions that may have huge economic benefits in a way that the government economic offices don't directly measure?
In today's episode of the podcast, we consider how science policy might be framed to reflect the range of impacts provided by science and the importance of science communication in achieving this.
I'm John Bailer. Stats and Stories is a production of the American Statistical Association, as well as Miami University's Departments of Statistics and Media, Journalism, and Film. I'm joined by Rosemary Pennington, chair of the Department of Media, Journalism, and Film.
Our guest today is Baroness Alexandra Freeman of Steventon, British science communicator, life peer, and former television producer. Previously, she worked from 2000 to 2016 for the BBC. As a producer or director, she was involved in Walking with Beasts, Life in the Undergrowth, Bang Goes the Theory, Climate Change by Numbers, and Trust Me, I'm a Doctor.
In 2016, Freeman joined the University of Cambridge as executive director of the Winton Center for Risk and Evidence Communication in the Faculty of Mathematics. She was appointed a non-party political life peer by the House of Lords Appointments Commission in May of 2024 and has served as a crossbench member of the House of Lords since then.
Her maiden speech in the House of Lords occurred during a take-note debate on science and technology contributions to the UK economy. Most recently, she was elected the next principal of Hertford College, Oxford, in November of 2025.
Alex, it is such a delight to welcome you back on the podcast.
Alex Freeman
Thank you, John. Love to see you again.
John Bailer
Oh, indeed. It's hard to believe it's been more than five years since we last chatted, and boy, since then you've joined the House of Lords and become a principal of a college at Oxford. Congratulations on these accomplishments, and thanks for raising the bar for all of us when we look at our last five years.
I mean, you know, so can you describe how you came to join the House of Lords and what your responsibility is there?
Alex Freeman
I know. How did this happen? I ask myself this question daily.
Yes. So the House of Lords is not a place I was particularly familiar with. I was, you know, I'd been, as you say, a fairly normal producer, director of television programs, and then sort of went back to academia a bit in Cambridge and was studying and doing communication of evidence, scientific evidence, and wanting to make a difference with scientific evidence and help people who were making decisions that could be helped by scientific evidence.
And we were winding up the center in Cambridge because it was always supposed to be a limited-term project, and we wanted people from the center to go on to other things and take what they'd learnt during their time in the center to other places where they could make a difference.
And I was thinking, well, what am I going to do to make a difference with this learning that I've got from what I was doing in Cambridge? And I was listening to the radio, and we have a morning radio program in the UK that a lot of people listen to, and it interviews politicians and all sorts of people every morning.
And there was an interview about, actually, about water pollution, and then the next person who was being interviewed was a member of the House of Lords who is a member of the Green Party, and she was saying, "Well, wasn't that a brilliant interview? It's great to hear a scientist communicating about the actual evidence in this important policy sphere. What we need is more people like that in the House of Lords, where we're discussing legislation and policy. And I would encourage people who are good at listening to scientific evidence and communicating it to apply."
And I kind of sat bolt upright in bed listening to this on an early morning, saying, "Apply. Well, you've just described me. This is what I do. It's all my career has been trying to understand scientific evidence from all sorts of disciplines, and then communicate it in a way that helps people make decisions. That is my job, and you're telling me I can apply for a job doing this in the House of Lords."
So I immediately went over to my laptop and Googled this, and found that you can indeed just fill out an application form and put your CV in, and so I did. Probably only a few days later, just thought, well, why not?
And I didn't hear anything for over a year, so I was off doing other things. And I'd completely forgotten about this, thinking, well, you know, I put my hat in the ring, but, you know, what's the chance?
And I was just taking an 11 o'clock coffee break, came downstairs, pressed go on the kettle, and my phone went ping. And the subject of the email was "Interview at the House of Lords," and it just said, "Please read the attached document," and it was a PDF on my phone.
I was opening it and trying to, you know, read a whole PDF on your phone. And I'd been invited to interview for this job as a Baroness in the House of Lords, which is probably the most intimidating interview request that you can imagine.
And so I turned up a month later, having done as much preparation as I could imagine. I'd been into the House of Lords. I talked to people who were doing the role. I had got myself fully stuck into committees and sat in on committees and all the things that they do.
And the interview was probably one of the shortest in my life. It was 40 minutes in front of a panel of people, and as they started, the first thing they said was, "We won't be able to let you know for several months the outcome of this."
So then I had to go away from that and spend several months just wishing and wishing and wishing, and then one Friday night when I thought, well, you know, it's been three months, but they won't call now. So Friday night I shall relax.
It's past 5 p.m. And as I was just thinking, well, it's past 5 p.m., so there goes another week. The phone rang with an unknown number, and it was that call of a lifetime where I, you know, literally had to sit down.
The person on the end of the phone said, "You might want to sit down," and I did.
Rosemary Pennington
I had no idea you could interview to become a member of the board.
Alex Freeman
No, I mean, who knew? Nobody knows this. So I spread the word that if you have skills that could be useful, and you're a UK citizen, you can apply.
Rosemary Pennington
For people outside the UK, how does the House of Lords differ from the House of Commons? What is it, and why is this a big deal that you have been included in this body?
Alex Freeman
I mean, even people within the UK will probably not quite know what the House of Lords does. So in the UK, within Parliament, we have two houses: the lower house, the House of Commons, and the upper house, the House of Lords.
And the House of Commons is elected, and we have representatives geographically. So every geographical area elects that member of Parliament who goes and sits in the Commons, and they usually stand for different parties, political parties.
In the House of Lords, members are not elected; they are appointed, essentially, by the King, but on the basis of a recommendation by the Prime Minister. And a lot of them are appointed to represent, or, to start with, to represent a political party. But it's a lifetime appointment, so you never have to be appointed again. You're there for life.
But a number of us are appointed as non-party political peers, and that's called being a crossbencher. And that means, in my case, I was appointed on the basis of an interview, and not many of us are appointed this way. So, a maximum of two a year.
So there are, you know, now, after many years, a little pool of, you know, 40 or 50—I'm not quite sure—people appointed this way. But the crossbencher pool is bigger because crossbenchers can be appointed without going through interview, so that we have, you know, people who are experts in their careers but don't want to represent a party. They can be appointed.
And some party-political peers give up their party affiliation. They fall out with their party, or their party falls out with them, or they decide that they would prefer to not be told what to think. I whisper slightly, and they can become crossbenchers, and then they can have independence of voting and independence of thought.
I'm sorry, I'm being slightly rude to my party-political members and colleagues.
John Bailer
There, that's perfectly acceptable here, and we encourage that.
Yeah. So what kind of responsibilities do you have in this new role? What are some of the—do you serve on committees? Are there sort of particular areas where your expertise is being embraced?
Alex Freeman
Yeah. So I would say there are probably four things that we can do as members of the upper house.
Firstly is, well, since I am non-party political, but also if you're in an opposition party, you're there to hold the government to account. So you can ask questions, and when you ask questions, the government has to respond.
So I can table up to six questions a day, written questions, and the government has to respond within a time frame, so that's quite a useful power. So I can ask a lot of questions, and I can ask them orally as well.
So that is—you have to put your question in a ballot, and there's a ballot every day, and four questions are chosen, usually four, three or four are chosen every day, and they are put to a minister who is brought into the House. They have to stand at the dispatch box. You ask your question. You can ask a follow-up question, and then in the next 10 minutes, anybody else in the chamber can ask follow-up questions.
So you're basically airing topics and showing that this is important, and you can hold feet to the fire. Really, so the questions are pretty good, and four of those a day—you can get through quite a lot. So those are useful things, being able to ask questions.
You can also table a debate. So if there's something that you feel really passionately about, you can bring that to the floor of the House. These, you know, everybody wants to table a debate. Not everybody. Lots of people want to table a debate, so these are done by ballot as well.
But if you're lucky and you get a debate, then you can either have an hour or possibly longer on a topic of your choice. So that's bringing—and again, a debate has a minister in it, and everybody who speaks, the minister speaks last, and they have to respond to all of the points that are raised in that debate.
So it's another good way of making sure that the government are considering hard the questions that you want them to.
Then, obviously, what people might think of as our main job is to scrutinize legislation. So the government are bringing bills through Parliament all the time, and they can start either in the Commons and then come to the Lords, or they can start in the Lords and go to the Commons.
But every bill has to go through both chambers, and we can table amendments, and we can argue those amendments. And in the House of Lords, every amendment that is tabled will get debated.
So if I want to put down an amendment to a piece of legislation, it will get debated. I will introduce it. Other members might speak to it. The minister has to respond, and that happens twice.
So I get two chances. The first stage, you're kind of punting and you're listening to the response, and then if you think, "Yeah, I really want to follow this through," you put it through again. You get two bites of the cherry, and at the end of that second debate, you can put it to a vote, and so the chamber will vote.
And if you win that vote, the government has to change that legislation, and then it has to go back to the other chamber to be signed off. So they have to then vote on it, and so it goes ping-pong, ping-pong, ping-pong between the chambers until eventually an agreement is arranged.
Either you lose a vote, or the government gives up and says, "We're going to make an amendment, a government amendment."
So changing legislation is obviously a very powerful thing that we can do, but it's also quite difficult to win a vote and win a concession from the government. So you have to work hard with the opposition parties if you're a crossbencher, because we don't have the numbers to win a vote.
But if you've won support from the other parties, then you can.
And then the fourth thing that I think is really important is, as you mentioned, committees. So there are committees that write reports and do inquiries, and I've been on one already, and I'm on a second now.
I enjoy committees because this is really playing to the things that I'm used to doing, where you really dig into the evidence and you can convene experts, you bring them in, you can ask them all sorts of questions, and then you're synthesizing that evidence and bringing it together and saying, what's really going on here? What could we do that could make a difference?
And then we put recommendations to government, and again, the government has to respond to each of our recommendations and say either we are going to do it, or when we don't agree with it.
And then again, we get a debate on that. So again, the government minister has to stand in front of you and say why they are or aren't going to do something, and then we can follow up on that and say, have you actually done it? In a question later on.
So I think those are the four major things we can do.
But as a fifth thing, we can also just use convening power. So sometimes you can just hold a round table in Parliament and say, we really need to sort this out. I'm going to invite, you know, these five people from different backgrounds that I think need to be in a room together, and it might not involve government at all.
But I think if we get these people in a room together, we might be able to sort something out, or at least come up with some ideas. So that's essentially what we do.
John Bailer
You're listening to Stats and Stories, and we're talking with Alexandra Freeman about the importance of science communication in politics.
Rosemary Pennington
So John mentioned earlier that you gave your maiden speech during this science and technology economy debate. I wonder what you were hoping to be able to do with that first speech. Like, what were your goals?
Alex Freeman
Well, giving your maiden speech is a very nerve-wracking thing, and really, you need to choose a debate which has a topic that allows you to explain your biography.
So part of that speech is me introducing myself to the House because you're brand new there. There's, you know, 500 people who've known each other for years, and you need to stand up and give a speech which allows them to know who you are and what your expertise is, and why you're there and what you care about.
So I wanted to introduce my background as a scientist and as a communicator, but I also, because the debate was about the contribution of science to the UK economy, I wanted to almost challenge the normal political thinking that I think there is around science, which is, you know, we contribute great things as scientists to the economy through inventions that can be monetized, and we contribute great things to society through our blue-skies research.
And so often I hear the two things. You know, there's innovation which drives industry, and there is blue-skies thinking which hopefully down the line can perhaps drive industry.
But it seems like everything has to go through the Treasury, and everything has to be counted in a really monetizable way, and I wanted to raise that kind of third thing that I think a lot of scientists really care about, which is improving society, but in ways that aren't directly measurable to the financial economy.
So things like improvements in education, improvements in care and health—that you know you can try and put costs and money on it—but really, it's about just making people's lives better, and that's what I think often gets ignored, and yet is really the primary motivation of so many scientists.
So I wanted to raise this as something, and I think actually that underlies a lot of what I want to do within the world that I'm in in policymaking, is not to be—you know, I'm not there as a scientist representing science. I'm there as somebody who understands how science can contribute evidence that can help us make better decisions in policy terms that makes people's lives better.
John Bailer
So you mentioned that you can submit up to six questions a day that has to be responded to. What were some of the first questions that you really felt this kind of burning desire to have a reaction and response from government?
f
Alex Freeman
Oh, you're testing my memory. I can't remember.
John Bailer
Oh, I'm sorry. Okay, the most recent one then. I mean, you know, my first—
Alex Freeman
Questions were actually on the risks of synthetic biology and mirror life, if I remember rightly.
So there are all sorts of things that, you know, science pushes the boundaries of, which are quite difficult for people without a scientific background in policymaking to even know is happening, and certainly to understand the potential risks of.
And so, I, having listened to people within the scientific community who are working in these areas, wanted to raise these potential risks and just make sure, because the questions—you don't always—I mean, I think civil servants, to be honest, try to make the most bland response possible, and I think they have a competition running on it because you very rarely get an answer that's a satisfying answer to you.
But what you know is that you've mpade some civil servants look into something. You know they've probably seen your question and had to go away and Google stuff and find out, actually, what is mirror life and do we have a policy on it? And what's happening?
So just by raising a question, you can raise the profile of something. And if you're really concerned about it, people can raise the same questions or questions on the same topics every six months, every year, and that's important to keep things at the front of people's minds.
John Bailer
So I'm curious, what skills from your past life have kind of most informed your present work?
Alex Freeman
Well, I think the most important thing, and this comes from my work in television, is being able to very quickly get up to speed on a subject and being—not being discipline-specific.
I was trained as a biologist, but—and first of all, I started using my biology background in filmmaking. But very quickly I had to be making films on all sorts of things that I knew nothing about to start with.
But you're able to read the evidence and get up to speed and ask pertinent questions, and you have no hesitation in picking up the phone to a researcher in any field and talking to them about it and finding out quite quickly what the key points are that you, in a film, would want to get across, but in a speech you might want to ask as questions to government.
So I think the ability to be able to read and understand and talk to people in any discipline and quickly get that together and get it into a speech is probably the key skill, because it's quite interesting that my last job at Cambridge was about communicating to inform, but not persuade.
And now, of course, I have to persuade, and so it's almost going back to my previous job of being able to write speeches that have that kind of script quality of leading people through the evidence and actually persuading them at the end.
And I'm almost wrestling with this difference in me, and also working out how different rhetorical styles work.
You know, I've given a number of speeches now, and how I might write for a script is very different from how I currently write for a speech because we're timed. We are up against that clock.
There is literally, out of the sight of the cameras, a massive digital clock that's counting, and it goes red and flashes at you if you've gone over time because everything's timed.
Almost everything's time-limited, and so you have to be able to put your key points together in between three and six minutes, and if it's an oral question, in 75 words.
But, you know, you've not got long, and you've got to make your points. So there's very little room to be discursive and tell a story. You kind of think: bullet point, bullet point, bullet point, hitting those key points, which, you know, needs a bit of practice, I would say.
And I also probably might well—I might explore a bit more storytelling in future speeches because bullet points work when your audience already are interested enough to engage with the topic.
But if you are trying to bring what might be quite an important but esoteric-sounding scientific point to a debate where nobody else is interested or has any background in science, I think maybe you need to wind the story in a little bit.
So I shall be experimenting as I mature in this job.
Rosemary Pennington
In your maiden speech, you talk about this issue of trustworthiness and how to be able to communicate science effectively, there's some set level of trust that has to be established.
The communicator has to establish their trustworthy source, and then the audience needs to believe that they can trust the person who is speaking and the facts that they're sharing.
And I wonder, how are you thinking about that issue of trust now that you've moved to this different space where you again are just talking about how you're already thinking about how to shape your speeches in a different kind of way?
Alex Freeman
Yeah, I mean, it's a really interesting question because, you know, as I just said in your maiden speech, you're trying to give your credentials, as it were, so that people know what your background is.
And in a way, I kind of hate using your credentials as a passport to trustworthiness, and yet it is a real shortcut sometimes to just say, you know, my doctorate was on this subject and I'm going to be talking about this subject.
So, I mean, to be honest, it's pretty rare that I'm talking on the evolution of butterfly wing patterns in Parliament, but which is what my doctorate was on.
But still, I do often start a speech giving the reasons that I'm speaking on this subject. It might be that, for instance, I spoke recently on the very contested assisted dying bill, and the reason I was speaking on it was about communication with patients and how it's really important that patients have information that's unbiased, that's not there to persuade them to make a decision in one direction or another.
This is what we worked on for years in Cambridge, and we made a lot of decision aids for patients to help people make decisions, and I wanted to make sure that the bill had provision to make sure that patients had information available to them that was official information and wasn't going to persuade them.
And of course, people would say, "Well, yes, of course it does. You know, we can just put in a clause."
And I had to explain the process that this requires and how long that takes, and therefore that it needs to be resourced, and therefore it needs to be in the bill in such a way that it was the responsibility of somebody who could assign budget to it.
And so, in order to explain all of this, I needed to explain my background and what we had done in the Winton Center, and therefore give the reasons for—hopefully, people might put weight behind my argument because I had done it, I understood the resources involved, and therefore this is why it was important to me.
And so I hope that you can demonstrate the trustworthiness of your evidence that you're giving, essentially, to Parliament by explaining your experience and how that has led you to the speech that you're making and the points that you're making.
And sometimes that's personal, and sometimes I'm speaking on a subject in which I don't have personal experience and expertise, and I'm representing the expertise of others.
So I might say, for instance, I spoke on bird-safe windows and the need for bird-safe glass that has ultraviolet coatings so that they can see it and don't crash into it.
And I was citing figures and numbers, and I was citing research, and it's quite easy to throw numbers into debates and try and use them as credentials, and, you know, blinding with science.
And I think it's much more important—oh, I think it's very important for us when we're presenting numbers not to simply expect people to accept them, but to be able to explain.
And I actually made a mistake, I think, in my first speeches on that subject because I started with the quite shocking statistics about how many birds are thought to be killed every year by glass, and it's obviously an estimate and very difficult to, you know, come up with a figure, and it's a very big number.
And I thought, well, it's a very big number, so this shows the importance of the problem before I go into the solutions. So I threw in the number of, you know, 30 million birds thought to be killed every year in the UK by glass, and people didn't believe it.
The minister said to me afterwards that it was such a big number that they didn't believe it, and I had cut out of my speech, to get to time, some of the how—that, you know, some of the context of that number.
And so I really learned from that.
The next speaker actually picked up on it and said, "I heard gasps at that number," and, you know, this number comes from this because she had read my briefing notes that I'd sent around other peers to say, "This is what I'm going to say if you want to speak on this topic," and so she picked it up, which was very good.
But again, the minister said to me afterwards that she hadn't believed that number, and so when I came back to argue more on that, I had to then put more context around it.
And it was a real lesson to me that if you're going to use numbers that are very shocking and surprising in a documentary context, I was used to doing that as part of the BBC because they would know that the BBC would always be right, but they don't know that I, as an individual, even as somebody speaking in Parliament, am always going to have the right figures.
My credentials don't extend to, "Oh, we'll believe what Baroness Freeman of Steventon always says." No, why should they? I should give context, and I should explain where those figures come from if they're going to be surprising.
John Bailer
Well, that’s all the time we have for this episode of Stats and Stories. Jessica, thank you so much for joining us today.
Alex Freeman
Thank you for having me.
John Bailer
Stats and Stories is a partnership between the American Statistical Association and Miami University's Departments of Statistics and Media, Journalism, and Film.
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