Show your workings

We expect the government to make policies based on evidence, or that they know the evidence and have clear reasons to reject it. But how can we weigh up the evidence behind a policy if we can’t even tell what the department has looked at?

At Sense About Science we find it difficult to work out what the chain of reasoning for some policies is. Others much better connected with policy making, such as the Institute for Government, find it difficult too. So together with them, and with the Alliance for Useful Evidence and helped by many others, we’ve developed a benchmarking framework on transparency of evidence. Anyone can use the framework to rate policy documents on how transparent they have been in the use of evidence behind policy decisions.

We are going to use it with a sample of documents to compare and rank departments and agencies in 2016. We’re also going to turn it into an online tool for anyone to rate an individual policy document. Right now, we welcome your feedback about how easy it is to understand:

Read our publication about how we designed the framework.

Go straight to the framework.

Send us your feedback: enquiries@senseaboutscience.org 

Share it on Twitter using #AskforEvidence

Image by Alex Thompson.