Source · Select Committees · Public Accounts Committee
Recommendation 22
22
In 2019, this Committee reported that the Department did not understand what impacts its £12...
Conclusion
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
Government Response
Not Addressed
HM Government
Not Addressed
2.1 The department agrees with the Committee’s recommendation. Target implementation date: September 2023 2.2 The department has a strong understanding of what works for local growth, as demonstrated by the literature review within the Levelling Up White Paper. 2.3 What works in local growth is a complex research area and unsurprisingly there remain some evidence gaps. The department is proactively filling these through engagement with academics and learning from forthcoming evaluations of the UK Shared Prosperity Fund (UKSPF), Levelling Up Fund, Towns Fund, Freeports, and Local Growth Fund (LGF). With the exception of UKSPF and LGF, evaluation strategies have already been published. The LGF evaluation is currently being scoped with view to publishing an evaluation next year. The UKSPF strategy will be published later this year. 2.4 In addition, the department has established the Spatial Data Unit, which is improving the subnational data that is needed for effective evaluation. Also, as noted in the Levelling Up White Paper, the government is committed to working with academics and industry experts to test and trial how best to design evaluation of local interventions and introduce more experimentation at the policy design stage. 2.5 Processes to feed evaluation findings into local growth activity and wider levelling up agenda is at the design stage. The government will be pleased to share progress on this and developments on evaluation commitments in a year’s time.