Dr. Iain Anderson

Disambiguation: Not to be confused with Iain Anderson (Lobbyist), Scottish director of Cicero Consulting.

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Dr. Iain Anderson was a special adviser to the Labour Party from 1998 to 2000, and authored a 2002 inquiry into the foot-and-mouth crisis.

Background

Anderson is a graduate of Glasgow University, having gained his BSc in 1959 and PhD in 1962. He is married with two sons.

In 2008, Anderson was knighted for public service in acknowledgement of his inquiry into the 2001 outbreak of foot and mouth disease.

Anderson has worked for Unilever since 1965 and is the chairman of the chemicals sector. He joined the Unilever board in 1988. In 1995 Anderson was appointed to the Board of Directors of BT as a non-executive director. He is chairman of Intense Photonics and non-executive director of Scottish and Newcastle.

Foot-and-mouth inquiry

In July 2002, Anderson published his report; the last of three separate inquiries into the crisis. His conclusion came as a suprise to critics (and government insiders) who had anticipated that Anderson's links with Downing Street would affect his ability to be objective and thorough in his investigation into the government response, as described in The Independent:

Within Government many were privately hopeful that Dr Anderson would not flay the Ministry of Agriculture over its handling of the epidemic. They thought that by supplying him with the team of civil servants they could hope for a "tame" response.

Three separate inquiries were set up into the outbreak:The Royal Society looked at the science behind the epidemic, Sir Don Curry examined the future of farming while Dr Anderson would consider the Government's handling of the crisis.

Farmers, environmentalists and opposition MPs claimed that this amounted to a "whitewash" that would fail to expose the full extent of turmoil within Whitehall.

Yesterday, with the publication of the report, many critics were silenced as Dr Anderson spelled out criticism after criticism of the Government's performance and concluded that it handled the crisis with confusion and incompetence.