Recommendation 22

In 2019, this Committee reported that the Department did not understand what impacts its £12 billion Local Growth Fund had had on local economic growth yet had decided not to evaluate it.65 We were encouraged to learn that the Department has now decided to reverse that decision but, as the NAO’s report highlights, designing an evaluation at the end of a scheme is not best practice as activities such as establishing a baseline against which to assess impact will be extremely difficult.66 The vital importance of embedding evaluation into programmes from the start was also stressed to us more recently by the government’s heads of evaluation and analysis, who are trying to improve practice across government as a whole.67 The Department assured us that this retrospective approach is not one it would take now and stressed the importance of continued evaluation and its prominence in the White Paper.68 We asked the Department how it intended to use the metrics in the Levelling Up White Paper to evaluate what was working and what was not. The Department told us that evaluation was at the heart of its work and, in a break from the past when it left evaluation to local bodies, it was putting evaluation strategies in place up front.69