As cuts to public expenditure are ramping up, demand for public services and economic growth remains as high as ever. Pressure to deliver more for less is resulting in an increased focus on innovation – in the way that public services and the economy are provided, supported and managed.

To discuss science in Parliament, we invited Dr Evan Harris and Dr Julian Huppert to deliver our fourth Distinguished Lecture.

A number of key posts in Government are held by people who spent most of their careers as academics. These advisers and policy makers are brought into the civil service because of the knowledge that they bring to policy issues, even if they do not have a practical knowledge of policy. Consequently, the transition from university academic to government civil servant can be quite a challenge.

The Centre’s latest Policy Workshop – The Values and Valuation of Natural Capital, organised jointly with the Cambridge Conservation Initiative (CCI) at the Institute for Government on 13 October – brought together policy makers from Defra, DECC, CLG, DfE, BIS and DfT, alongside zoologists, economists, engineers, geographers and conservation scientists.

We are delighted to announce the launch of an ambitious and exciting new programme in science and policy research.

Behaviour change experts and officials responsible for policies to encourage increased energy efficiency met earlier this month in a workshop organised by CSaP for the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC). The UK's targets for reducing carbon emissions are ambitious and a wide range of tools for emissions reduction merit consideration.

What role can the Centre for Science and Policy play in cultivating and nurturing scientists with an ability and passion for communication and policy?

Sarah Mukherjee delivered the CSaP's third distinguished lecture on how politics and media influence public feeling about climate change, and the impact it has on policy making.

To mark the launch of the Centre Interest Group on Genomic Medicine, the CSaP hosted a dinner discussion on 12 May at Queens' College, Cambridge. Sir Mark Walport led the discussion.

May saw the launch, in pilot form, of our Policy Fellowship Programme. Cambridge researchers welcomed the opportunity to meet the policy makers, noting the value that they had gained by "getting a window into the policy environment".