In our May 2022 report on evaluation, we pointed out that the same barriers to departments doing more evaluations had been in place since 2013. These include a lack of political engagement and a lack of incentives for departments to produce evaluations. HM Treasury told us that it still has more to do to address these barriers. It told us that departments have the desire to demonstrate what they have delivered for their investment. However, the time it can take for value and benefits to be realised, as well as the time it can take to carry out an evaluation means that evaluations are not always carried out. In particular, these issues of timing do not always match with the political cycle of, for example, elections and spending reviews, which can mean that departments are not incentivised. HM Treasury told us that because the cost of an evaluation is small compared to the cost of delivering a project, it does not consider cost to be a barrier.10 Cross-government working