This afternoon, Danny Alexander and Oliver Letwin launched something so sensible it’s astonishing governments haven’t been doing it before. They’re actually going to use evidence to determine which policies work. The idea is that a number of different centres in a new ‘What Works’ network will examine how effective policies really are, identifying which represent value for money and which don’t.
That begs the question of what on earth is happening at the moment when it comes to scrutinising policy. There is plenty of high-quality evidence swirling around that rarely even gets a mention when a policy is up for debate. But when politicians do mention it, they often cherry-pick it, twist it, or, er, simply invent it to support a position. This policy-based evidence-making (rather than evidence-based policy-making) is brilliantly described by Mark Henderson in his book The
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