Source · Select Committees · Public Accounts Committee
Recommendation 24
24
Accepted
Department outlines comprehensive evaluation for £10.47 billion spending, including jobs and town comparisons.
Conclusion
We were interested to hear how the Department was going to provide a comprehensive evaluation of the £10.47 billion total that is being spent. It told us that there was always a balance, when doing place-based interventions, as to the timing of when you do them versus waiting for the outcomes you expect.65 The Department explained its evaluation would cover more than just the measures used to prioritise places and would include measures such as the number of jobs created, or the gross value added to the economic productivity of an area. It also told us that, for the Towns Fund (consisting of Town Deals and the Future High Streets Fund), it would look to compare similar towns that received funding to those that did not.66 The Department said it would also make sure there is a clear link with the funding that it had provided, and the improvements seen.67
Government Response Summary
The government agrees with the committee's conclusion regarding the need for comprehensive evaluation of spending, setting a target implementation date of December 2025. It asserts that it already has clear plans for long-term impact measurement, detailing published evaluation strategies, feasibility studies, data requirements, and the use of external experts for robust evaluation.
Government Response
Accepted
HM Government
Accepted
6.1 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.