Policymakers across the UK are drowning in conflicting COVID-19 data and need a single trusted source to tell them what actually works. The problem is that during a fast-moving crisis, governments must make urgent decisions—on care homes, homelessness, or support for ethnic minority communities—but the relevant evidence is scattered across hundreds of academic papers, policy trackers, and international reports. There is no system to rapidly sort reliable findings from weak data, or to connect what other countries have tried with what might work in Britain. The International Public Policy Observatory (IPPO) will build that system. It combines a team of evidence-synthesis experts at UCL, a global COVID policy tracker from Oxford, and science-advice networks in New Zealand, with policy engagement hubs across the devolved UK nations. They will triage incoming research, broker conversations between academics and officials, and co-produce answers to pressing policy questions. If it succeeds, local and national governments will make fewer mistakes under pressure, avoid repeating failed policies from elsewhere, and deliver better outcomes for the most vulnerable—without each department having to reinvent the wheel.
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The International Public Policy Observatory (IPPO) will address the social impact of COVID-19 and policies to mitigate against a range of negative impacts. It will be responsive, rigorous and react quickly to policymakers' pressing challenges. Responding to policy needs, it will mobilise an international network of resources, drawing on evidence, analysis and understanding of policy actions and results globally to deliver useful, accessible insights to policy stakeholders. Our ambition is to enable national, devolved and local governments to: make better decisions in conditions of stress; avoid unnecessary mistakes; enable ongoing engagement with, and application of, evidence to inform rapidly evolving policy needs; and achieve better outcomes for the British public, particularly at-risk groups, including those in care, homeless people, and BAME communities. The IPPO will respond to the needs of policymakers (the demand), triaging the complex array of potentially relevant information (the supply) to offer evidence-based insights, particularly in fields with uneven data and evidence reliability. Ongoing intermediation, brokering and curation will be critical to connect supply and demand at speed and identify areas where more evidence is needed. Driven by intensive interaction between academics and policymakers, the IPPO will allow them to co-design evidence and policy questions and co-produce research, so that high-quality evidence and research best informs policy. Our proposal combines leaders in in-depth evidence synthesis (the UCL EPPI-Centre), global COVID policy tracking (OxCGRT, and INGSA, the International Network of Government Science Advice based at the University of Auckland), and communication (The Conversation). It also involves policy research and engagement leaders across the UK in the devolved administrations (SPRE in Edinburgh, SPARK at Cardiff, and Queens University Belfast and Pivotal, Northern Ireland's leading policy think tank). The IPPO will also have access to a wide range of other types of scientific knowledge which will be relevant to policy actions. Our aim is to provide a model for more effective observatories in the future.
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