Government and academia: Summary

Openness to external evidence is crucial to good policy making. Academia in the UK produces a lot of valuable evidence, insight and analysis, and researchers have, in recent years, been increasingly eager to share them with policy makers. But more activity from the research community has sometimes led to confusion and duplication, and government has not always succeeded in capturing all of this expertise and feeding it into decision making.

The mechanisms that central government uses to bring in academic evidence to inform departmental work – ranging from areas of research interest to secondments and What Works Centres – have remained broadly the same since the Institute for Government’s last report on how government can more effectively work with academia, which was published in 2018. ⁴ 1 Sasse T and Haddon C, How Government Can Work with Academia, Institute for Government, 2018, retrieved 26 February 2026, www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/publication/how-government-can-work-academia  In many cases, they have matured and become more embedded, with some instances of new and innovative developments taking place.

A stronger suite of mechanisms is certainly positive: we know more about how to build the right tools to leverage the UK’s world-leading research sector. But in too many cases, departments have not been clear about what they want from researcher engagement. Ad-hoc initiatives from government have doubled uncoordinated efforts from academia, leading to ineffective use of resources, missed opportunities for join-up and a landscape that is difficult to navigate for time-poor officials.

Overall, there is more appetite from universities, research councils, learned societies and others to support academic–policy engagement since our report in 2018. And central government departments have developed increasingly sophisticated routes to bring expertise and evidence in-house. Civil service leaders should build on this momentum, but to do so they need to be clearer about what they want.

Departments need to develop researcher engagement strategies

Different engagement mechanisms can be used to satisfy a wide variety of evidence needs. But to use them effectively, departments should develop researcher engagement strategies that clearly outline what they want from academia.

These strategies should inform: 

• how engagement mechanisms are developed and how they join up 
• how researcher engagement is evaluated 
• how initiatives can draw on existing best practice from across government.

Strategies do not need to look the same across government, but they do need to provide an opportunity for departments to do internal thinking about their evidence needs and capacity for researcher engagement.

Implementing and maintaining engagement strategies will require dedicated capacity – departments will need to devote staff time and resources to institutionalise points of contact between government and academia. But a relatively small investment in staff resources can have an outsized impact.

A more strategic approach to researcher engagement will require a clearer articulation of responsibilities so that individual leaders can be held to account for delivering these strategies. At present, leadership and oversight for researcher engagement are fragmented, with responsibilities split between different departmental leaders. There is no one-size-fits-all approach here, but being more explicit about ownership can make the system easier to navigate and drive accountability for delivering on engagement strategies.

More broadly, civil service leaders need to act to shape civil service culture as well as the incentives officials have to engage more consistently with external evidence. The following could be valuable steps in the right direction:

• including researcher engagement in career progression criteria 
• providing more space and cover for officials to interact with academics and build their own networks 
• encouraging greater data and evidence transparency where possible.

Substantial progress has been made in bringing policy and research closer together since the Institute for Government’s 2018 report on how government can work with academia more effectively. If departments can succeed in bringing more coherence to this ecosystem, they will see substantial improvements in how evidence gets fed into, and deployed in, decision making, with better policy that more effectively serves citizens.