Local Economic Growth What Works Centre

The What Works Centre aims to significantly improve the use of evidence in the design and delivery of policies for local economic growth and employment leading to more effective policies and policymaking in these areas. To achieve this aim the Centre will bring together leading experts from three different institutions: the London School of Economics, Centre for Cities and Arup. LSE would lead the Centre, coordinating the work of all three partners. It would ensure the Centre's independence and oversee the work of an academic panel providing world-class expertise to ensure the Centre's work is robust and rigorous, and viewed as such by users. CfC would lead on engagement, drawing on many years' experience working with local actors, plus extensive networks and contacts, to ensure that users are able to access and use the work of the Centre. Arup would lead on evidence-gathering and synthesis, drawing on expertise in evaluation, best practice review, developing best practice guidance, and project management. They would work with the academic panel to ensure timely delivery of robust evidence reviews that will constitute the Centre's core written outputs. We believe that the immediate, year one, priorities of the Centre should be to i) identify key policy interventions where there is sufficient evidence to properly assess effectiveness; ii) undertake systematic reviews to rank these interventions; iii) ensure that the findings are accessible to policy makers. To deliver these immediate priorities we will develop a transparent methodology to rank interventions relevant to local economic growth; conduct a systematic assessment of the existing evidence base, and develop an online toolkit allowing users to compare interventions ranked using a common currency. In the medium term (years two to three), the Centre will focus on developing effective knowledge exchange and capacity-building, using our evidence base and engagement tools. We will aim to i) ensure that the evidence base is used to improve policy making; ii) further enhance the policy areas covered by of the evidence base (responding to user feedback and emerging needs). We will do this through promoting the benefits of good monitoring and evaluation; developing guidance for public sector policymakers; and working with a small number of leading local actors to develop best practice and guidance for others. The longer term aims of the Centre are to ensure that evidence is widely used in the development of policy, to ensure that new policies are effectively evaluated and that individuals and organisations have the capacity to feed the findings back into future policy development. Realistically, these long term aims can be partially but not fully achieved within the initial three years of funding. To help secure these longer-term goals, we will work with local and central government to improve data management; partner with selected local actors to develop demonstration projects; and identify outstanding research gaps and funding opportunities to fill these. To ensure that the work of the Centre is useful to, and thus used by, policy makers the Centre will operate as an open, flexible, learning organisation. We will develop mechanisms to allow users to help shape the Centre's priorities and development; and expand and update our evidence base to reflect changing needs and new evidence that emerges. We will also actively participate in the What Works network, working with the National Advisor to develop the network and common standards, working to achieve accreditation and participating in the evaluation of the effectiveness of the What Works network.