Coronavirus highlights the need for government and academia to work together

So many areas of our lives have been affected by Covid-19. We are in the process of reinventing how we live and work, socialise and travel, educate and entertain. Policy makers are navigating a huge range of competing demands, trade-offs and decisions.

An unprecedented crisis requires unprecedented solutions. As such, policy makers need access to a broad spectrum of expertise. This means working with historians as well as epidemiologists, architects as well as economists.

But a crisis is both a vital and a difficult time to develop new relationships – networks between academia and government need to exist already if insights and expertise are accessed rapidly. Our new guide, How to Engage with Policy Makers, sets out how academic researchers can work with government. However, government also needs to create opportunities for experts of all disciplines to inform decision making.

Barriers still exist between academia and government

An all-consuming crisis such as the one posed by the coronavirus makes many existing barriers to the use of evidence even harder to surmount. Civil service capacity is stretched as never before, as government seeks to deal with the pandemic response, its reform agenda, and the task of implementing Brexit. At the same time, turnover throughout the civil service remains high, making it difficult for academics to build relationships with the individuals who would most benefit from their expertise.

Where civil servants do seek input from academia, it still tends to be focused on scientific and quantitative evidence. As well as providing disciplinary bias, this can also mean that policy makers struggle to engage on areas that would make policy design and implementation more robust – for example in contextualising the problem with reference to historical practice or that of other countries.

Government can learn from good practice in some departments

The coronavirus crisis has highlighted the value of departments having pre-existing networks with a diverse range of experts, and the need for departments to prioritise academic engagement in ‘normal’ times even though they may not be relying on these links immediately. While there is high turnover of staff, it is not enough to hope that relationships between individual policy makers and researchers will be enough to ensure access to high-quality expertise is maintained.

There are examples of good practice. Some departments have successfully built strong networks with academics through initiatives such as rapid commissioning of research, setting out areas of research interest ('ARIs'), and arranging short-term placements for academics to help develop policy. The government should embed these initiatives more broadly. We also recommended that every department create an 'expert network' to help officials find relevant academics, and that this be used in conjunction with evidence centres, advisory committees and a programme of secondments to ensure academic expertise is readily available at the heart of government.

More can be done to help academics make their expertise available during the Covid-19 crisis

But more can be done by academics as well. Our experience of working with academic researchers suggests they are increasingly aware of the importance of talking to policy makers and getting that all important ‘impact’ for their work. In partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, we run an annual programme for early career researchers to help them develop their skills in this area. Their experiences, set out in our newly released guide, show the routes to success.

Our alumni focus on building relationships, writing for a range of audiences, and promoting their expertise. They have also taken on board the need to be both patient and persistent – it may be many years before research becomes salient to policy makers, and when it does it pays to be part of the networks that policy makers will consult. One researcher told us of her frustration at finding out that her area of study was not the priority for any single department. As an expert of how to combine work and living space, her knowledge is now in high demand.

Academics should be better supported in these activities by their universities, research councils and funding councils. The Research Excellence Framework defines and rewards 'impact' narrowly, channelling funding to projects which can be turned into case studies that show clear evidence of a change of policy. Most interaction with policy makers or intermediaries is informal, and does not provide clear evidence of influence, but it forms the basis of the networks that allow academic evidence to permeate government.

On top of responding to Covid-19, policy makers must also implement Brexit and deal with the constitutional pressures that leaving the EU will place on the UK. So policy making must include as many voices as possible. Supporting academics by providing them with additional training, support to work with government and dedicated funding would allow this activity to increase at all levels. Academics must make themselves heard; and government must know how to listen.