‘What Works Centres’ are becoming an increasingly familiar part of the policy and professional landscape. In addition to the existing centres – covering more than a £250 billion expenditure – there is now a steady stream of interest in creating more.

Yet when the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) – in many ways the blueprint for later What Works Centres – was created in 1999, many doubted that it would survive to the next election. It was intended to get politicians, and the Department of Health, out of judgements about which treatments worked and for what. Yet senior figures feared that as soon as the young institution dared to say ‘no’ – that a given drug was not cost-effective – all hell would break loose.

Sure enough, it didn't take long for angry calls to be received in Whitehall from a major pharmaceutical company demanding that NICE guidance against its product be revoked. Against the expectations of many, the line was held, and the first of today's What Work Centres went on to help shape and guide the clinical practices of a generation.

At the time NICE was created, there was talk about creating a ‘social policy NICE’. Archie Cochrane himself nodded towards the need to extend such evidence-based approaches to other fields in an epilogue to his famous 1972 book Effectiveness and efficiency (Cochrane, 1972).

Yet it was not until after the 2010 election that serious work began into the wider application of the What Works approach and centres. A number of factors helped spark the decade of institution-building that followed.

First, the fiscal context sharpened minds. The UK faced a structural deficit of 8 per cent. Against this background, tough questions were being asked about what programmes and activities merited protecting – what worked and at what cost? Second, a weird part of No 10 – the Behavioural Insights Team – starting running randomised controlled trials. The rapid and practical conclusions these gave rise to helped to popularise experimental methods. Third, senior figures in the administration, including the new Cabinet Secretary Jeremy Heywood, the Cabinet Office Minister Oliver Letwin and the Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander, came to support the idea – not least with Jeremy's decision to major on the idea at his first speech in 2012.