I’m glad there isn’t a raffle at today’s Policy that Works conference. In order to make your efforts go further, I want to start by thanking you for everything you do.
Currently, the government spends almost £1 trillion of taxpayers’ money annually.
It’s imperative to understand how this money is used and whether it supports meaningful and effective policy.
We are to be one of those wonderful, vintage Rolls Royces that purrs and turns down the volume.
The Cabinet Office, the Treasury, and the Behavioural Insights Team conducted an analysis and discovered that just 8% of the government’s large project spending in 2019 had effective evaluation strategies in place.
We don’t want to be in this situation, and the National Audit Office is now criticizing it. Evaluation must have a specific plan for results in order to be useful in policymaking.
There must be flexibility in how things are delivered, whether that means scaling up or stopping entirely.
Additionally, we must encourage departments to approach evaluation without regard for the outcome.
HMRC is considering ways to undertake thorough and effective evaluation in order to better do what we are asking of you.
This can be accomplished by determining which elements of our suggestions are successful and which are not by testing minor innovations or modifications of existing policies or programs.
All of us must begin with modest pilot programs before moving on to larger rollouts.
If the pilot doesn’t work out, start again from scratch and try again.
The sunk cost fallacy, which holds that if $10 was squandered, we shouldn’t waste another $10 to justify it, is one of my major pet peeves.
An impact review will enable us to identify and address issues early in the implementation.
A joint Cabinet Office/Cabinet Office Evaluation Task Force (ETF) has been established by the Cabinet Office and HM Treasury with the goal of improving people’s lives by ensuring that solid data about the efficacy of policies and programs sits at the center of government expenditure choices.
A £15 million Assessment Accelerator Fund has also been established by the team, which will speed up evaluation work over the following three years.
I strongly advise you to think about how we may use this fund to find urgent solutions in top-priority policy areas.
We established the Evaluation Task Force because of our commitment to putting the results of real-world spending implications at the center of decision-making, even though we acknowledge that this style of working may entail changes in some departments’ customary working practices.
In order to provide a quality service to the taxpayer, we must be daring, unafraid of failing, and more evidence-based in our thinking. Several of these excellent reviews will be presented at this conference.
Many of these are from difficult policy fields, where it has been advised to departments that evaluation is not feasible.
I would advise you to utilize their assistance and persuade them to give you evaluation approaches you can use in your pilot projects and impact evaluations as you provide services to the British public.
We must ascertain what functions well and what does not.