Evaluating government spending

To improve the way that the separate parts of the evaluation system work, individually and collectively, HM Treasury and Cabinet Office should: a) work with the Evaluation Task Force to publish the roles and responsibilities of government bodies with respect to evaluation. This should include but not be limited to HM Treasury, the Evaluation Task Force, the Analysis Function and the CGEG; and

k) work with the Policy Profession to deliver plans to assess and improve evaluation literacy for policy professionals and analysts across government.

b) publish a plan for improvements to the evaluation system, including the outcomes they want to see and how they will achieve and measure them, including clear criteria for assessing whether the Evaluation Task Force is achieving its purpose.

The Analysis Function should: c) set out the appropriate governance structure for the ownership, maintenance, assurance and monitoring of evaluation standards as presented in its Analysis Functional Standard. It should agree with HM Treasury the funding and capacity implications for this governance structure; and

d) work with Cabinet Office to develop an appropriate assessment framework, which will provide the Analysis Function with the necessary levers to monitor and support departments’ implementation of the Analysis Functional Standard.

To promote transparency and strengthen incentives across government, HM Treasury should: e) write to departments asking them to publish an evaluation strategy covering their key evaluation evidence gaps, planned evaluations, lessons from recent evaluations and details of planned evaluation spend and staff resources. This should form part of future spending review settlement conditions and be updated in line with departments’ Outcome Delivery Plans and no less frequently than every three years;

f) work with Cabinet Office to reinforce the expectation of an ‘open by default’ transparency commitment relating to publication of evaluations when policies are planned, by recording departments’ explanations of why they have not published evaluations; and

g) work with the Evaluation Task Force on a robust and documented system to follow up cases where programme funding is conditional on the department performing evaluation activities and intervene if departments fail to do so.

To raise standards and support departments in consistently meeting evaluation requirements, the Analysis Function and the Evaluation Task Force should work with others in the evaluation community of practice (including CGEG and government professions) to make available in a single place: h) good practice, toolkits and operational guidance including, for example: • on how evaluation approaches can be embedded into existing departmental information and processes including risk management arrangements, to identify evidence gaps and make use of evaluation findings; • ways to strengthen integration of evaluation and policy design; • practical examples of how agile evaluation approaches have been embedded within policy delivery; and • to support access to thematic knowledge of what is working, why and lessons learned from evaluation findings across government; and

i) information on which interventions are continued, changed or stopped as a result of evaluations, to demonstrate the practical impact of good evaluation evidence on decision-making and help inform assessments of whether the evaluation system is working as intended.