Source · Select Committees · Public Accounts Committee
Recommendation 22
22
Accepted
Department developing robust evaluation plans for local growth after prior criticism.
Recommendation
In our report on Local Economic Growth, we were critical of the Department for not yet having developed the promised overarching monitoring and evaluation framework for local growth.58 The Department told us that, in response to recommendations from the Committee, it was putting in place robust plans for evaluation that will give it ‘unparalleled insight’.59
Government Response Summary
The government agrees with the recommendation and states it has robust plans to measure long-term impact, with a target implementation date of December 2025. It has published evaluation strategies and feasibility studies for key local growth programmes and is commissioning external experts for further methodological work.
Government Response
Accepted
HM Government
Accepted
The government agrees with the Committee’s recommendation. Target implementation date: December 2025 6.2 The government believes it does have plans to measure the long-term impact. The 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. 6.3 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. 6.4 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. 6.5 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. 6.6 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.