BLOG: Four days inside Government | Reflections from the Royal Society Policy Pairing Scheme

by Dr Livvy Swann | Senior Clinical Research Fellow

I am a children’s doctor and scientist, but a few weeks ago, I swapped hospital wards and datasets for Westminster corridors and ministerial offices, as part of the Royal Society Policy Pairing Scheme. The aim is simple: to give researchers and policymakers a window into each other’s worlds to improve science to policy translation. The reality is less tidy, but much more interesting.

I was paired with Ester Pink, a brilliant and passionate senior policy advisor at the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero. I arrived thinking I had a reasonable understanding of how policy works, but I left with a strong sense that both scientists and policymakers have been viewing each other through very different lenses.

Policy doesn’t sit around waiting for evidence

As scientists, we are trained to interrogate uncertainty. We caveat, qualify, and carefully avoid overstatement. This is good science, but policy operates in a completely different environment, one where questions arrive quickly and decisions often have to be made fast. Policy makers want to use the best evidence there is, but crises don’t pause while researchers run another sensitivity analysis.

From the outside, policy can look slow and bureaucratic. Inside, it feels fast, reactive and relentlessly pragmatic, shaped not just by evidence, but by timing, public opinion, and bandwidth. Sitting between science and policy is what one civil servant called “the messy business of judgment.”

It’s not a pipeline, it’s a relationship

From the outside, it’s easy to imagine policy as a linear process, and that if the evidence is strong enough, it will naturally shape decisions. As researchers, we often imagine a neat pathway: Research → Evidence → Policy. But policy isn’t a vending machine where you insert robust evidence and receive decisions. It is an ongoing negotiation between competing priorities, imperfect information, and political pressures.

Scientists and policymakers are often trying to solve the same problems, but with very different incentives, timelines, and definitions of what “good” looks like.

Dealing with a 1000-year-old political institution can be complex

Part of what makes these difference so striking is the sheer complexity of the institution itself. Government hasn’t been designed, it has accumulated and evolved over hundreds of years, and it shows. 

This simple truth changes how we need to approach it. If you’re expecting Government to be a rational, optimised system, you’ll be eternally frustrated. If you consider it as something living and layered, built up through crises, compromises, and personalities over centuries, it starts to make a bit more sense.

Evidence matters, but so does how you communicate it

One of my most uncomfortable realisations was how poorly academic writing prepares us for policy engagement. We are trained to write balanced, carefully referenced papers. We are specifically trained not to sound persuasive. However, during my week in Westminster, policy colleagues kept returning to the same questions:

At one point, after a long explanation, someone smiled and asked: “That’s great… but can you make it into three bullet points?”

Policymaking is about making the best possible decision within real constraints, not identifying a theoretically perfect solution. As scientists, we need to relearn some skills we have systematically trained ourselves out of which are hugely valuable to policymakers These include the ability to frame evidence clearly, explain why it matters, and communicate clear recommendations in usable ways. This isn’t about spin, but about clarity and relevance. As one civil servant put it: “We need you to let us know that if these are the tools we have, then these are our options.”

The slightly surreal parts

There were also moments where the whole thing felt otherworldly. Walking past Ed Miliband in a corridor on the way to something referred to as the “Harry Potter lift,” sitting in a minister’s office trying not to stare too obviously at the red box, and watching Wes Streeting discuss the meningococcal B outbreak in Kent from the House of Commons public gallery. That last moment was a strangely full-circle one for me as a Paediatric Infectious Disease doctor who spends much of my clinical life thinking about exactly these infections.

But underneath the slightly theatrical Westminster moments was something more useful, a growing appreciation for just how complicated, and how human, policymaking really is.

Exchange visit

The Policy Pairing Scheme runs both ways, and hosting Ester in our research group for three days at the Usher Institute was, frankly, brilliant. Her visit created ripples across our whole team department. She spoke to academics about how policy is made and spent time hearing how we use electronic health record data safely for research. She also joined a University of Edinburgh workshop for researchers wanting to engage more seriously with policy, where she served (with great good humour!) as our mystery shopper. She was particularly interested in how we involve patients and the public in our research, and how our approaches could help policymakers run better consultations.

Ester also gave us an unexpected gift, coaching us to communicate our work the same way she'd brief a minister with lines to take, what to say if pushed and where absolutely not to go! It turns out that "don't say anything you're not prepared to see on the front page of a newspaper" is good advice whether you're in Whitehall or communicating research to the public. 

What I’ll do differently

The Royal Society Policy Pairing Scheme offers something really rare, not just access, but the chance for mutual understanding. For me, policy has started to feel less like a distant destination for research, and more like a fast-moving, human process that we are already part of, whether we engage with it or not. I’ve come away with a few clear shifts in how I think about my own work:

• Engage earlier with policy colleagues, before a crisis, not during one.
• Be clearer and more deliberate in how I frame evidence.
• Focus on the relevance, and timing, not just rigour of our scientific findings.

If we want science to shape policy, we need to do more than produce good evidence. We need to learn how to communicate it, frame it, and share it in a way that works in the real world.

Fewer caveats, more clarity, and probably fewer paragraphs.

Further information

Pairing Scheme | Royal Society