Asked by: Lord Kempsell (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Cabinet Office:
To ask His Majesty's Government what progress they are making towards reaching their 'Places for Growth' target to relocate 50 per cent of UK-based senior civil service roles outside London by 2030.
Answered by Baroness Neville-Rolfe - Minister of State (Cabinet Office)
The Places for Growth Programme has relocated 30.9% of the UK-based Senior Civil Service outside of London since March 2020. The programme continues to engage closely with departments to accelerate SCS role relocations outside London in order to meet the 2030 50% commitment.
Asked by: Lord Kempsell (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Cabinet Office:
To ask His Majesty's Government when they next plan to update their Magenta Book: Central government guidance on evaluation.
Answered by Baroness Neville-Rolfe - Minister of State (Cabinet Office)
The Evaluation Task Force (ETF) is responsible for the Magenta Book: Central Government guidance on evaluation.
The ETF plans to update the Magenta Book by the end of the 2025/26 financial year.
Asked by: Lord Kempsell (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Cabinet Office:
To ask His Majesty's Government what proportion of the Government's Major Projects Portfolio are subject to a formal evaluation of their outcomes; and whether the proportion has increased since 2020.
Answered by Baroness Neville-Rolfe - Minister of State (Cabinet Office)
A review by the Prime Minister’s Implementation Unit in 2019 found that only 8% of the spending on Major Projects had robust impact evaluation plans. The Evaluation Task Force is currently undertaking a new review of evaluation in the current Government Major Projects Portfolio, which now represents £805 billion of whole-life costs, compared with £432 billion in 2019. The findings from this new review, alongside an action plan that describes how improvements will be made, is planned to be published this year.
Asked by: Lord Kempsell (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Cabinet Office:
To ask His Majesty's Government what standard of scientific evidence they require when commissioning internal and external evaluations of their policies and programmes; and whether they routinely require that an objective standard of evidence be met by, for example, mandating use of the Maryland Scientific Methods Scale or similar.
Answered by Baroness Neville-Rolfe - Minister of State (Cabinet Office)
Evaluation is a Treasury requirement for all Government policies and programmes. All evaluations of Government policies and programmes must be carried out in line with the evaluation standards in the Magenta Book (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-magenta-book), which is Treasury guidance on how evaluations should be undertaken. Annex A of the Magenta Book details the analytical methods which can be used. All Ministerial Departments have published an evaluation strategy on GOV.UK (https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/evaluation-strategies-from-uk-government-departments), publicly setting out how they will meet the required standards.
The Evaluation Task Force (ETF) was established in 2021 with the aim of increasing the quality and quantity of evaluations conducted across Government. The ETF works closely with evaluation leads within Departments to advise on evaluation designs and application of evaluation methods and to ensure that Government evaluations are robust and are delivered to a high analytical standard. This involves identifying the most proportionate and robust method(s) suitable for each policy or programme in question.
The ETF does not have a routine set of requirements which Departments are held to, because the most appropriate method for each evaluation is specific to the policy and programme context. In some cases methods which score lower on the Maryland Scientific Methods Scale may represent the most robust and proportionate approaches for a Government policy or programme. While the ETF works with Departments to ensure that the most robust methods possible are applied to each policy or programme, this is done on a case-by-case basis rather than through the application of a scale or framework.
Asked by: Lord Kempsell (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Cabinet Office:
To ask His Majesty's Government what steps they are taking to improve the evaluation of their policies, and what progress has been made on the work of the Evaluation Task Force.
Answered by Baroness Neville-Rolfe - Minister of State (Cabinet Office)
The Evaluation Task Force (ETF), set up in April 2021, has provided advice on 211 evaluations covering £115bn of Government spending. It has also launched the £15m Evaluation Accelerator Fund through which more than 20 evaluations have been funded in priority areas.
The ETF is currently updating the Government's major projects review with the hope that all new major programmes in Government will have a robust evaluation in place by 2023
By launching the Evaluation Registry the ETF will provide a single repository of evaluations of UK Government programmes, policies and projects. The Registry has been preloaded with over 2,000 existing Government evaluation reports, making it one of the largest sources of policy evidence in the world.
Finally, the ETF has set up and delivered the Evaluation Academy to 42 Civil Servants in 13 ministerial departments and the Scottish Government. These delegates have gone on to share this expertise by training over 1,100 civil servants in their respective Departments, creating free and sustainable evaluation training.