The Government spends around £2.5bn a year on policy research, but does not know how many studies it has commissioned or which of them have been published, according to a recent investigation.
The charity Sense About Science carried out an inquiry into the delayed publication of Government-commissioned research in response to media stories alleging research findings were being suppressed or delayed.
The report from the inquiry, entitled Missing Evidence, revealed the publication of research has been manipulated to fit with political concerns, but added poor records conceal the extent of this behaviour.
It also discovered only 4 out of 24 government departments maintain a database of research they have commissioned and Government officials frequently have to resort to Google to track down their department’s research.
Eleven departments were unable to provide a list of research they have commissioned, the report said. And of those, seven said that they didn’t hold that information centrally and it would be too costly to gather.
Civil servants also told the inquiry they spent significant amounts of time trying to find past studies they commissioned and paid for.
The report’s author, Sir Stephen Sedley, a former judge in the Court of Appeal, recommends that Whitehall sets up one central, publicly accessible register for all government-commissioned research.
Responding to the inquiry’s findings, Sense About Science said: ‘Millions of pounds of research is lost from government records. Ghost research is being created: paid for but, unrecorded and unpublished, it becomes unfindable in the national archives and exists only in the memories of officials.’
