Question to the Cabinet Office:

To ask His Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of the report of the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee, Use of evaluation and modelling in government, Session 2022─23, HC 254, published on 27 May 2022; and how much they have spent on external evaluations of their own policies in each of the past 15 years.

The Government formally responded to the findings in the ‘Use of evaluation and modelling in government’ report in the August 2022 Treasury Minutes, which are published online.

Across government, HM Treasury, the Analysis Function, the Finance Function, the Evaluation Task Force, the Cabinet Office and departmental accounting officers all have an important role to play in improving evaluation and modelling.

Evaluation is an important ingredient in improving value for money and learning from mistakes and successes.

The Evaluation Task Force was set up to improve the way government programmes are evaluated and enhance our assessment of whether programmes should be continued, expanded, modified or stopped. The Evaluation Task Force provides all ministerial government departments with evaluation support on request, as well as a proactive scrutiny and challenge function, which is responsive to requests from Treasury and Cabinet Office ministerial priorities.

Departments, however, are responsible for evaluating their own programmes. The Government does not centrally hold data on how much departments have spent on external evaluations in each of the past 15 years. Some departments may individually collect this data.