Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:

To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, with reference to the report by the National Audit Office, Funding and structures for local economic growth, HC 542, published on 6 December 2013, what steps he has taken to implement recommendation 22f on page 13 of the report.

As Enterprise Zones are a long term intervention (25 years in total) and the programme is still at an early stage, an evaluation of impact at this point would be premature. This reflects the practice of the previous evaluation which was commissioned in 1995 to assess the performance of Enterprise Zones that had been designated between 1981 and 1984.

However, the Department is looking at options now for a robust evaluation in the future, taking into account recent National Audit Office work on evaluation of spatial programmes, and lessons that can be learnt from the evaluations that are underway on other local growth programmes such as the Regional Growth Fund.