Adding it up
The Summer Placements in Whitehall scheme has now been devolved to Departments. Please contact Departments directly for further details.
This scheme was developed to fund academic summer placements in Whitehall in accordance with conclusion 39 of the Performance and Innovation Unit Report “Adding it Up”. The scheme started in June 2002 following a successful launch of a pilot in June 2001.
For further details on "Adding it Up" please contact SAR Business Support.
Evidence Based Policy Fund
The Evidence Based Policy Fund has been fully exhausted so is no longer available. Further details on how this fund was distributed below:
The Evidence Based Policy Fund was launched in response to the Cabinet Office report “Adding It Up” published in January 2000. It was conceived as a seed corn fund to promote the supply of research and analysis for crosscutting policy, and also as a means of strengthening links between Universities, Research Institutes and Government through the financing of applied research on some of the Government’s priority topics. The fund was aimed, in particular, at the sort of research which might not otherwise have been undertaken in departmental research programmes, either because it cut across issues in more than one department, was too speculative or too long term.
EBPF was designed to 'prime the pump' for cross cutting research and it could be argued that this should have been achieved through its first three tranches. Initially allocated £4 million from the CMF, three Tranches of the fund have now been completed allocating a total of approximately £3.4 million. One of the main aims of the fund was to identify and plug gaps in the evidence base which fell between the traditional boundaries of individual departmental research programmes.
Tranche 1 of EBPF was organised under three themes:
- Child poverty: the role of mainstream public services
- Productivity: the contribution of public services and other policies
- Rural development/environmental protection
After inviting bids from departments who had either identified, or were yet to identify suitable academic researchers it, attracted 39 bids and allocated £1.4 million across 12 projects.
Tranche 2 received a total of 31 bids across a wide range of subjects and allocated £0.7 million across 14 projects. Rather than being organised along specific themes it was open only to departments and any proposal which fulfilled the basic fund criteria.
Following Tranche 2 of the fund, an Evidence Based Policy Workshop was held in partnership with CMPS. Policy makers were invited from across departments in order to identify gaps and set themes for the third Tranche of EBPF. The event was well attended and generated a large number of themes. It did though receive a fair measure of criticism for a lack of focus and flexibility.
Tranche 3 was organised under the themes arising from the workshop and refined in consultation with departments and spending teams. It opened up the initial bidding process to both departments and researchers either with or without sponsorship. As a result a larger number of bids were received (a total of 111) leading to 15 projects being funded at a cost of approximately £1.25 million.