Given our concerns in the past about the Department’s failure to put in place quantifiable objectives to help it measure the impact of its interventions on local economic growth, we asked the Department how it intended to approach this for the Towns Fund, to properly measure impacts such as job creation and improved wellbeing.32 The Department explained that it hopes its monitoring regime will measure outcomes that gauge improvement in the health and vitality of towns.33 The Department expects outcomes to depend on the nature of each project, but it wants to be able to look at a basket of measures at three different levels: the project level, the town investment plan level, and the overall programme level. It outlined how it plans to monitor the impacts of the Towns Deals on employment, income and wellbeing against the baseline of what is happening in those towns and, in due course, compare the performance of towns that have benefitted from the Towns Fund with other, similar towns.34