Evidence Week is held annually in UK Parliament, and brings together researchers, community groups and parliamentarians to share ideas about research and policy.
Parliament is where the issues that affect us are raised, debated and reasoned through. MPs move from discussing the impact of housing policies in their constituencies to debating extended cancer screening programmes; from interrogating the assumptions behind the user-demand models for HS2 to questioning the Treasury on which regions will benefit from a new innovation fund.
It’s a tall analytical order for people whose primary job is to represent their constituencies and parties, but we believe that MPs don’t need a scientific background to understand evidence. Evidence Week is an opportunity for the public, parliamentarians, and researchers to come together to share knowledge and insights that will help politicians scrutinise evidence.
“Worrying about whether politicians have science backgrounds is a mistake. What we should ask is, what are the insights and resources from research that would help politicians? That’s what Evidence Week is for.” – Tracey Brown, director, Sense about Science
Evidence Week 2019
In 2019 more than 100 MPs and peers got involved in Evidence Week. We brought in 20 research groups from partner organisations to host innovative evidence pods. These 3-minute briefings tackled issues such as how to: visualise community inequalities, work out the effect of pupil premium or see the scale of the drone noise problem. We counted 163 of these innovative briefings given to MPs and peers across the two days.Evidence Week 2019