Tracey Brown has led the attack on scientific attention deficit among politicians

Evidence Week in the UK Parliament has become a data goldmine for policy-makers

On any given day, the diverse demands on politicians’ time require an extreme form of attention triage. As for their dealing with complex scientific or technical issues, good luck. 

Tracey Brown saw this attention deficit, and decided she and her organisation, Sense about Science, could attack the problem.

When you are on the front line dealing with everything from homelessness, to Treasury modelling, and vaccines, a degree in physics may not get you there,” she told The Brilliant.

Brown has been the Director of Sense about Science since it was set up in the UK in 2002 to create links between scientists, journalists and policy-makers. The aim was, and remains, to combat misinformation with evidence-based science.  

In 2017, Brown was awarded an OBE for services to science. Under her leadership, the charity has turned the case for sound science and evidence into popular campaigns to urge scientific thinking among the public and the people who answer to them.

One of the most successful political initiatives led by  Sense about Science is called Evidence Week. Over three days, participating MPs, peers, parliamentary staff and community members are provided with information on topics of interest in ‘evidence pods’. 

During Evidence Week 2019, 163 pods covered topics including the economic impact of automation, the impact of climate change at the local level, and how to reduce homelessness.

These pods are not simply briefings by experts to a passive audience.

“We want researchers to give them access to resources that helps them understand and contextualise the evidence,” Brown says.

Instead of trying to turn politicians into scientists, we should ask: what are the insights and resources from research that would help politicians scrutinise the evidence and the policies, and are they using them?”. 

This, she adds, is “quite a leap of thinking” for many researchers. Before their Evidence Week immersion, experts may have simply concentrated on getting their concerns onto the policy agenda. After an immersion course, their priority shifts to helping politicians and policymakers use evidence to do a better job. 

The Covid-19 pandemic is a classic example.

“What seemed a matter for epidemiology and immunology quickly impacted on many areas, including mental health and education,” Brown says. “Just because your research is not itself in the spotlight, as a researcher you need to be thinking what policy questions will come out of this and what you can feed into those. Talking to politicians is not all about asking for greater attention or funding.” 

The aim of Evidence Week is to help MPs consider a complex set of variables. For example, giving them a working knowledge of idea of how Artificial Intelligence functions can help them assess how to fuel electric cars from the existing electricity supply grid. One Evidence Week pod helped connect the factors contributing to homelessness with the new  unemployment statistics. 

So what’s been the impact of helping understand and interrogate evidence?

In 2018, the team at Sense about Science knew air quality was on the political agenda, and set up an evidence pod in response. Researchers from three universities used health and real-time air quality data to show MPs, who attended with some of their voters, the effects of poor air quality in their constituencies.

“An MP could come along, meet their constituent who was concerned about air quality in their area, have a look at the air quality in their district and delve into the specific health consequences. It was bringing all these very large data sets together: if we’re seeing [these low air quality levels] happening at 2pm today, what does that actually mean for the impact on asthma, and so forth, here?” Brown says.

MPs went straight from that briefing to the debating chamber of parliament, where air quality was on the agenda, and raised research findings during discussion. Afterwards, around 20 more MPs came to the briefing pods to seek information on what was happening with air quality in their district. An enquiry has since been set up, based on this debate.” Brown says.

But for Brown, the measure of impact is not limited to a set of specific policy changes. “What I want to see out of this is not so much the law or policy move in a particular direction, but that government policy itself [is] informed by the evidence – that there’s a sensible debate about that evidence, and it draws from cutting-edge research.”

The crucial question Brown is currently confronting – with politicians and society at large – is: are we equipped to ask evidence questions in the 21st century?

When you have decisions being made by algorithms and AI tools and the like, are we actually in a position and do we feel confident to ask the penetrating questions about those? Because especially when it comes to really complicated topics such as AI decision-making tools, I think a lot of politicians back off.”

And that’s where there’s some serious bluffing going on. “They probably feel past the point when they can turn around and ask what they think might be a dumb question. You don’t particularly want to be the one to ask it, but it’s actually the question everybody in society has. And that’s a dangerous place to be. We saw this with the culture around medical practices in the 1960s, and we are seeing this now with AI and big data.”

Rather than assuming knowledge or making people feel dumb, Sense about Science takes the approach of helping politicians interrogate what is being presented to them. How do you ask about the reliability of an AI-based decision-making tool to decide, say, who needs welfare? “We need to help them ask that reliability question and break down the evidence,” Brown says.

As a consequence, evidence pods equip politicians and the community to ask questions that penetrate and disaggregate data – not passively receive briefings and information.

Now, politicians approach the Sense about Science team and researchers who presented in the evidence pods with follow-up questions. And, Brown says, they are comfortable asking and knowing which kinds of experts they need to talk to.

“So someone presents you with a graph that tells you that this is a situation where free school meals didn’t actually make any difference to educational outcomes – which [at first glance] is what it looks like. But, if you disaggregate those data, you can see that people from very particular backgrounds benefit, and others don’t. But if you don’t know how to ask that question, you wouldn’t know,” she says.

“It may sound obvious, but MPs are just like the rest of us. Many don’t come from science backgrounds so it feels quite powerful, I think, for them to realise that they can break something apart and look inside it.”

For Brown, running Evidence Week has been informative. “It was fascinating to watch how it got people thinking and engaged people from across parliament, even those who would not typically attend a science event.”

Although politicians are very often focused on party issues and following media coverage, they have been quite responsive to the argument that their constituents value science-based evidence.

As a result of insights delivered during Evidence Week, UK politicians can become better equipped to:

• interrogate evidence across a range of policy issues
• ask the right questions
• present and apply new sources of data
• explore complex interactions and variables and outline possible trade-offs
• disaggregate data

Evidence Week is a positive experience for researchers too. As Brown points out: “Thinking about where people are coming from is such a beneficial thing for researchers and scientists who want to contribute to understanding of their subject, in any forum.”

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Article by Kylie Ahern

Featured photo credit: Image supplied