Clever collaboration

PA Consulting Group looks at how policy-making means bringing enough evidence to the table to facilitate a mutually beneficial dialogue between policy-makers and their stakeholders.

Evidence-based policy-making has been a theme of the last decade in UK public policy. Early in this administration’s history, the 1999 Modernising Government White Paper set the ambition that ‘this government expects more of policy-makers. More new ideas, more willingness to question inherited ways of doing things, better use of evidence and research in policy-making and better focus on policies that will deliver long-term goals'.

By using evidence as the basis for policy-making (rather than, say, dogma or the power of particular interests), the Government had hoped to build up trust in the way that it makes and implements its decisions.