Recommendation 3

No single body is responsible for upholding modelling and evaluation standards and monitoring their implementation. Within departments, ultimate responsibility for upholding standards and securing improvements lies with that department’s accounting officer. Supporting the accounting officer, the departmental directors of analysis own the application of the Analysis Functional Standard in their departments. Neither HM Treasury nor the Analysis Function 6 Use of evaluation and modelling in government currently monitor if accounting officers are discharging their responsibilities nor how well standards have been upheld. While HM Treasury is an important user of departments’ models, it does not comprehensively scrutinise and challenge a department’s quality assurance arrangements for the models it uses. To address this gap the Analysis Function intends to strengthen the governance framework for the Analysis Functional Standard, including introducing a self-assessment framework to assess performance against the standard. The Function told us it believes it does not currently have enough resources for this, but intends to request additional funding from HM Treasury. Recommendations: The Analysis Function, under the responsibility of the UK Statistics Authority, should: • put in place an appropriate assessment framework to monitor departments’ implementation of the Analysis Functional Standard; • act on areas for improvement identified through its assessment framework; and • agree with HM Treasury the funding it will provide for these roles. HM Treasury should set out how it plans to gain confidence that the outputs it uses from departments’ business critical models have been quality assured appropriately.