Recommendation 20

Business survival rates are a key metric for measuring the Scheme’s impact. The Bank has commissioned an external evaluation study, which will report in stages over the next three years.50 We therefore asked the Department when we could expect to see the results from the first stage of its evaluation. The Department told us that it expected the first stage shortly from Ipsos MORI and London Economics. The Department agreed to write to us to confirm the exact timing for publishing the findings.51 The NAO explained that the Bank’s evaluation over the next three years will seek to draw lessons from both an operational perspective (‘process evaluation’) and economic perspective (‘impact evaluation’). The process evaluation will examine the effectiveness of the Scheme’s design and delivery mechanisms and will report in 2022. The NAO reported, however, that 44 Public Accounts Committee, Covid-19: Bounce Back Loan Scheme, Thirty-Third Report of Session 2019–21, HC 687, 16 December 2020 45 Treasury Minutes, CP 389, February 2021, para 6.2 46 Q 8; C&AG’s Report, Figures 2 and 3 47 Qq 9, 10 48 Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy, Annual report and accounts 2019–20, Page 223 49 Qq 9–10; C&AG’s Report paras 6, 13 50 Q 10; C&AG’s Report, para 24 51 Qq 10, 12, 99–101 16 Bounce Back Loans Scheme: Follow-up measuring the Scheme’s impact will be challenging as there is a lack of reliable data to compare the recovery of businesses that used the Scheme with a similar group that did not.52 The Department and the Bank recognised that finding a counterfactual for this Scheme and other Covid support schemes is an issue. The Bank assured us that it was confident that it would be able to find a control group from businesses that did not take a loan, which would allow it to understand if the Scheme itself had made a difference.53 Unintended impacts of the Scheme on the lending market