“David doesn’t do science”.

I remember a volunteer calling those words across the office a few years ago as they put down the phone and relayed their conversation with a British MP’s assistant. A constituent had asked the MP to meet them at a briefing on air quality during Parliament’s – an annual event, now in its eighth year, which brings together the public, researchers and parliamentarians to discuss how evidence is used at Westminster. But the MP was having none of it.

Nor was this an isolated incident. It used to be common to receive responses like that. Science has recently been the professed interest of just a handful of MPs, and the learned societies, science publishers and research bodies knew which three or four would reliably show up to an event or speak up when the government trailed cuts to the research budget.

This general disengagement with science in Parliament has always worried us, particularly given the rapid innovations in health, cities, agriculture and information technologies. That is why we at Sense About Science established Evidence Week in 2017. And, to be fair, participation has always been fairly high – largely due, I suspect, to our involvement of constituents in setting the agenda. But it was still an incredibly heavy lift, involving weeks of calls and emails and a lot of work from constituents, research partners and the Parliamentary Office for Science and Technology.

But this year something has changed. More than 100 MPs’ offices signed up to January’s Evidence Week 2024 (postponed from last autumn because of the election), many of them immediately. Staff enlisted in training on issues such as the use of survey data and AI, and MPs asked a host of questions on topics such as health data, post-Covid school attendance, pollution and transport.

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Evidence Week 2025, which is running this week, is seeing a similar pattern, with a lot of interest in food security, energy, regional inequalities, carbon capture and cancer detection in particular. It’s still a mammoth operation to crowbar briefings into packed parliamentary diaries, but not once has an MP’s office suggested that their member doesn’t do science.

So what is changing? The work of government, for one thing. The policy focus on economic recovery and state efficiency through innovation, most recently emphasised in the Spending Review, leads straight to researchers’ doors. The NHS’ new 10-year plan published in July makes over 150 references to technologies. The government’s AI strategy highlights an ambition to integrate science and innovation into economic planning. Data and climate technologies are no longer fringe topics; they are seen as integral to the UK’s competitive future. The strategic direction is clear: if the UK can position itself at the forefront of these sectors, it stands to reap the economic benefits.

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And where government goes, parliamentary scrutiny must follow. MPs are eager to be in touch with unfolding discoveries about the opportunities and risks of new technology, whether it’s finding ways to leverage AI to boost public services or embracing green technologies to meet climate targets.

Interest is also very high in protecting social well-being amid the need to make tough decisions about resource allocation; many constituents’ questions submitted to Evidence Week concern the basis of such decisions. Then there is a more straightforward call for help with information saturation. How do we know which claims are reliable? How do we spot a deep fake? Why do two surveys show two different conclusions? How do we distinguish between shocks and trends?

My own impression from eavesdropping on the briefings, is that the pandemic also played no small part in alerting politicians to the value of reliable data for making decisions.

All this presents a huge opportunity for research institutions and scientists. To respond though, they must meet MPs where they are: focused on the pressing need for reliable sources, new information and clearer understanding of the options, but constrained by the realities of time and resource pressures.

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The research groups who are capturing parliamentarians’ attention best at Evidence Week are those that distil complex findings into insights that help decisions. They give policy-related time frames. They look at real-world costs and returns. They compare scenarios. They show how demographic trends affect the viability of services or put interventions (heat pumps) into context (emissions targets). They show where the uncertainty is and what might change, and they forge relationships with the MPs’ offices to keep them abreast of that change, whether they do science or not.

Researchers increasingly ask me whether participation in Evidence Week falls along party lines. It doesn’t seem to. I suspect that what that question is really getting at is what would happen if we had a Parliament full of Reform MPs – as opinion polls suggest that we soon might. Would science be caught up in a renewed rejection of established conventions and institutions?

I don’t know the answer to that, but I am hopeful that by continuing to focus exclusively on evidence and data, keeping as far away as possible from any culture wars that revolve around the idea of being pro- or anti-science, we as a scientific community can maintain politicians’ attention.

We need to help MPs of all parties to recognise that a performative scorn of evidence is not the way out of economic malaise.

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Tracey Brown is director of Sense about Science and an honorary professor at UCL.