Source · Select Committees · Public Accounts Committee
Recommendation 6
6
Accepted
Update on evaluation progress and ensure robust long-term data for sustained improvement assessment.
Conclusion
We recognise the Department’s plans to evaluate these funds in the short-term, but we are concerned it has no long-term plans to measure the impacts. The Department is playing catch up in its efforts to carry out robust evaluation. Having previously not considered evaluation well enough, it is now putting in place plans to carry out evaluation of the funds. Evaluating the impact and added value of levelling- up funds will be complex and will require a wider range of information than that used to award funds in the first place. It may be challenging to show clearly what outcomes can be convincingly attributed to the funding awarded. The Department expects findings from the evaluations to start becoming available from 2025. We are however concerned about how the Department will ensure robust data over the long-term and surprised that the Department has no long-term plans to know if these funds worked, for example, by reviewing over five, ten, and 15 years to find out how people have benefitted from the investments. Recommendation 6: In its Treasury Minute response, the Department should: • update us on its progress with evaluation and provide us with regular updates thereafter; and Levelling up funding to local government 9 • update us on how it will ensure it has the right data and how it will carry out evaluation over the long-term to assess whether the investments have led to sustained improvement. 10 Levelling up funding to local government 1 Progress of project delivery
Government Response Summary
The government confirms its evaluation strategies are publicly available, citing published feasibility and scoping studies for various funds. It details its approach to ensuring robust data, including building spatial data and commissioning external experts for impact evaluation, with reports to be published for transparency.
Government Response
Accepted
HM Government
Accepted
The government agrees with the Committee’s recommendation. plans are clearly and transparently set out in the public domain. Indeed, the recent NAO report recognised the significant improvement the department has made in evaluating local growth programmes with evaluation strategies now published for key evaluations. The department has published feasibility and scoping studies for the UK Shared Prosperity Fund, Levelling Up Fund, Towns Fund, Local Growth Fund alongside a local growth evaluation strategy. These can be accessed on the DLUHC local growth evaluation homepage. There are specific challenges in evaluating the impact of local growth programmes. These include the difficulty of identifying meaningful comparator places and attributing impacts to specific interventions where places may receive multiple or overlapping funding streams. The department is combatting these challenges. The published feasibility and scoping studies set out plans for evaluation including data requirements to ensure the department has the right data to support planned evaluation activity. In some situations, this involves building robust spatial data such as through the local authority level boost to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport’s Community Life Survey (England), to provide estimates of Pride in Place at the local authority level. Due to the particular technical challenges in conducting an impact evaluation for local growth programmes, the department commissions external experts to explore the methodologies that can be used to robustly measure the impacts and value for money of these programmes. These reports will be published for transparency.