The Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) is a social purpose company. They are jointly owned by the UK Government; Nesta (the innovation charity); and their employees.

BIT started life inside 10 Downing Street as the world’s first government institution dedicated to the application of behavioural sciences. Their objectives remain the same as they have always been:

- making public services more cost-effective and easier for citizens to use;
- improving outcomes by introducing a more realistic model of human behaviour to policy; and wherever possible,
- enabling people to make ‘better choices for themselves’.

They do it by redesigning public services and drawing on ideas from the behavioural science literature. They are also highly empirical; they test and trial these ideas before they are scaled up. This enable them to understand what works and (importantly) what does not work.

They have around 150 employees, who have either a strong academic grounding in economics, psychology and research methods or a background in government policymaking. Their headquarters are in London. They also have offices in Manchester, New York, Singapore and Sydney.