Coronavirus lessons learnt: many hands make impact work

UCL Public Policy convened responses from experts across UCL for the joint inquiry into ‘Lessons to be learned from the response to the coronavirus pandemic so far'.

Select Committees are cross-party groups of Members of Parliament (MPs) or Lords (or both) whose roles are to investigate specific issues. When a Committee launches an inquiry, they may issue a call for evidence, which is open to the public (including academics, researchers, etc.) to respond to. Evidence submitted to Parliament becomes a public document published on the Parliamentary website, making the submission of written evidence a defined route for academics to demonstrate their impact (which, in the nebulous world of policy impact and evaluation, is sometimes not easily done).  

In the spring 2020, the Health and Social Care Committee and Science and Technology Committee launched a joint inquiry into ‘Lessons to be learned from the response to the coronavirus pandemic so far.’ Given the breadth of topics on which the Committee sought evidence, UCL Public Policy, UCL’s flagship programme to support academic-policy engagement, leveraged UCL’s inter-disciplinary strengths and convened responses from experts across the university. More than 20 academics and researchers from the Faculties of Brain Sciences, Medical Sciences, Population Health Sciences, Engineering Sciences, and Maths & Physical Sciences shared evidence with UCL Public Policy, which was consolidated and organised around the inquiry’s terms.