Evaluation in Government Policy-making

Question

15:16:00

Asked by

To ask His Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to improve the use of evaluation in government policy-making.

My Lords, I recognise the work of the noble Lord, Lord Kempsell, in establishing the Evaluation Task Force, which is playing an important role in improving the use of evaluation across government. I also congratulate him on his new job. The Evaluation Task Force works with departments to ensure that evaluations of programmes are carried out and published. It also assesses the quality of evidence in business cases which inform public spending decisions. This Government remain committed to evidence-based policy-making and are using this to reform and improve our public services and enhance the value for money they deliver.

My Lords, I thank the Minister for her gracious reply. Vast amounts of public money are spent every day, but far too little attention is given to assessing whether those spending decisions actually achieve their desired outcome through good evaluation. In the wake of the Budget, which announced some of the highest levels of public spending in this country’s history, how do the Government intend to ensure that every pound of taxpayers’ money is not just well spent but that that spending is well evaluated?

The Autumn Budget announced a new public sector reform and innovation fund, which will support the development of new approaches to improving public services. This will deploy £100 million over the next three years to deliver innovative public service reforms in partnership with mayors and local leaders. The project’s primary focus is on experimentation and learning and will complement ongoing reform programmes and activities delivered by departments. Of course, evaluation—good evaluation—will continue to be key.

My Lords, is it not very clear that the Government are looking to make sure that evidence-based policy-making and evaluation become the norm? When I was last in government, I introduced numerous evidence-based programmes that were nearly all abandoned by successive Governments, including the one that the noble Lord who asked the Question was a member of. We have lost evidence-based policy-making that would have meant that today we had fewer children in care. Through supporting the evidence base for early intervention, fewer of them would have needed to go into care; that was proved through the evaluation. How are we going to get back to that sort of position?

This Government intend to use evaluation and evidence-based policy-making as the norm. We want to get away from the position we saw under the previous Government, where political decisions—including the Rwanda scheme—were more about newspaper headlines than value for money for taxpayers.

My Lords, will the Government’s Evaluation Task Force be looking at the costs and benefits we have had at a local level rather than from central government? Will it also be looking at the extra costs of outsourcing as opposed to occasionally insourcing? The question of care home and children’s home provision has already been mentioned; they are clear areas where there is waste, because giving the contracts to outsourcers gets them excessive profits, as they provide poorer services at a higher cost.

Absolutely. The fund I spoke of in response to the noble Lord’s initial supplementary will be working in partnership with local authorities, local leaders and mayors across the country. We are very clear that we need to drive out waste and ensure that we get value for money. When we talk about value for money, it is also about better outcomes for the people we serve.

In 2019, only 8% of major government spend was evaluated. Thanks to the Evaluation Task Force, it is now 44%. This figure should rise further still by Christmas. However, the outstanding 10DS team—the data science team responsible for this work—has apparently been moved from No. 10 and its responsibilities dispersed. There were also plans to publish a register of all government evaluations online this year. Can the Minister update us on that publication, and give assurances that the excellent work of 10DS will continue?

I welcome the noble Baroness to her place. I look forward to working with her in her new role. We see the Evaluation Task Force as a key element of our work, and we are planning to launch the evaluation registry in spring 2025 so that the public can get the transparency they deserve.

My Lords, does the Minister agree that the consideration of the previous Government to ban onshore wind generation is something that would have benefited from such an Evaluation Task Force?

My noble friend makes a really interesting point. Had the previous Government evaluated the potential benefit of the scheme, they would have found that the policy they pursued damaged our energy security and led to higher bills for both consumers and businesses.

My Lords, does the Minister agree that a budget for evaluation should be built into new programme settlements from the beginning, as happened with the New Deal in 1997? It is a practice which, sadly, has been rarely followed since then.

It feels entirely appropriate that evaluation should be built into any new policy area, and the intention is for this to happen. When the Evaluation Task Force was created, an evaluation academy was also set up, which addresses the skills gap that was perceived to be present within the Civil Service, so there is a training scheme whereby more than 2,000 civil servants have been trained in their respective departments. One would hope that no major project would be launched without evaluation being built in from the start.

My Lords, will the Minister take this opportunity to deny the reports in the press suggesting that Defra was consulted only the night before the Budget on the impact of introducing inheritance tax on small farms? As a result, it is said that the Treasury has grossly underestimated the number of farms affected. What does that say about the evaluation of government policy?

I respect the noble Lord’s right to raise that question in this place. However, I will write to him on that matter; this is not something that I can respond to today.

My Lords, does the Minister accept that while it is of course important that we know the financial cost of everything, there are aspects of public policy—such as culture, the arts, music, et cetera—where we need to also understand the value? Is it not unacceptable that we should know the price of everything and the value of nothing?

If I were to say yes, that would probably be quite a short answer. We are looking at social value as well as value for money purely in financial terms as part of our approach.

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Kempsell, will be aware that on 25 March, just slightly more than three months before the general election, the then Minister for the Cabinet Office, John Glen, addressed the Evaluation Task Force annual conference at the QEII Centre. The noble Lord’s Question caused me to look this up on GOV.UK. In the speech Mr Glen said: “A recent internal review by the Prime Minister’s Implementation Unit” found that “only eight percent of government spend on major projects is properly evaluated”. He went on to say that the Government had been trying to correct this situation since the spending review of 2021—11 years into government. This speech was made a further three years after that point. Will my noble friend join me in thanking the noble Lord for creating this opportunity to let your Lordships’ House know about another element of the inheritance left by 14 years of his party’s Government?

I thank my noble friend for that question. One would question why, when the 2019 Cabinet Office review found that only 18% of spending on the government major projects portfolio had robust evaluation plans in place, we ended up with the shocking Covid corruption that has led to us needing to recoup a lot of the money. I speak for the whole country when I say the country wants its money back.