Policymakers need empirical research, and a lot of researchers aspire to influence public policy, writes Stephen Easton.

Governments are increasingly using behavioural insights to design, enhance and reassess their policies and services. This report explores how this happens – and how any bias can be addressed or mitigated. To do this, this report focuses on three core activities of policymaking: noticing, deliberating and executing.

Billions of taxpayer dollars are committed before all the evidence for, and against, infrastructure projects is in, and basic rules of economic modelling are broken.

There is an accepted need to bridge the gap between academic research and public policy. Knowledge brokers, individuals or organisations sympathetic to both research and policymaking cultures and able to mediate between the two, represent one way of doing so.

This report sets out how government can improve the way it uses academic evidence and expertise in forming policy. Policy making is a core task for government. But to make policy well, government needs to be open to external ideas, including from academics.