Behavioural Insight Team yet to win converts, finds NAO

The Behavioural Insights Team, which has been tasked with looking at ways of achieving social and environmental goals without the need for regulation, has yet to be consulted by government departments to discuss “possible alternatives to regulation at the assessment stage”, the NAO said.

The report was published last week in the days following a hearing of the House of Lords science and technology committee, which is investigating the effectiveness of behaviour change programmes.

Oliver Letwin, the minister for government policy, spoke to the committee and admitted that it was “open to question whether any of this will have any effect whatsoever”.

“I don’t want to pretend that behavioural science is a sufficiently developed science to give us complete confidence or even sort of 95% confidence that any given technique will produce given results,” he said, according to a Guardian report. “As a matter of fact the science of investigating regulation isn’t sufficiently developed to give you that either. But I think it is extremely clear that it is pretty cost-free to do these things, pretty straight forward to do them so that if they don’t produce any result we won’t have lost much.”

The Behavioural Insights Team is advised by Richard Thaler, co-author of a book about ‘Nudge’ theory, and costs around £500,000 a year to run.