How to get value from Government money - a simple recommendation
It’s a truth universally acknowledged that people want to get bang for their buck. And the more money you spend, the more important it is that you spend it well. Enter the Government - one of the nation’s biggest spenders. How can it make sure it’s getting value for its money?
Well, the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) recently opened an inquiry into just this, asking how the Government can generate value from major projects.
We submitted written evidence. Our answer: better data on metrics, or measurements of value. The Government needs these metrics to know if its spending was worthwhile, if things are going wrong, and to learn lessons from the project. And it needs to collect these metrics from the start of a project.
The need for metrics might seem obvious. HM Treasury guidance even recommends that the collection of data for evaluation should be planned from the start of an intervention. Still, it often doesn’t happen. In 2019, the Prime Minister’s Implementation Unit (PMIU) found that only 8% of £432 billion of major project spending had robust impact evaluation plans, and 64% of spend had none at all.
Take the ongoing National Tutoring Programme (NTP), launched in 2020 to “increase the number of disadvantaged children receiving high quality tutoring in order to address the impact of Covid-19 on the educational outcomes of disadvantaged pupils”.
So, has the Government spent the money well? Do they need to make any adjustments to the programme? What should people setting up similar programmes learn? To answer these questions, we need to know:
the number of disadvantaged pupils receiving tutoring
the quality of the tutoring they received, and
its impact on their educational outcomes.
Unfortunately, none of this data was initially collected. The National Audit Office (NAO) could still not evaluate the NTP’s value for money as late as 2023, despite it having an estimated whole-life cost of over £1 billion.
As the statistic from PMIU suggests, this is symptomatic of a wider problem. Although HM Treasury recommends that metrics and data should be considered when developing policies, most people don’t heed this guidance. The NAO warned in 2021 that the main barriers to good evaluation in Government are a “lack of incentives… together with few adverse consequences” for weak evaluation.
The solution? Make metrics a requirement. Require major project and programme business plans to include consideration of metrics and data, and make programme budget approval conditional on those elements being in place.
This recommendation is in line with Sir Michael Barber’s 2017 report on evaluation in government, as well as practices used successfully elsewhere. In Japan, for example, the Treasury only approves spending that is backed by clear plans for impact evaluation, and expenditure fell because money was targeted more effectively. And in Canada, a similar policy led to government-wide improvements in evaluation.
Requiring robust evaluation plans for government projects means the UK can get more bang for its buck - a pretty uncontroversial win.
Read our response for our full recommendations and as always, if you’d like to get involved with this work, please get in touch at contact@centreforpublicdata.org.