A UK centre has spent six years sifting through thousands of policy evaluations to find out which local economic development programmes actually create jobs and growth—and now it is expanding its work for another three years. Local councils and national government spend billions on initiatives such as business parks, training schemes, and high street regeneration, often without knowing whether they work. The centre’s evidence reviews and toolkits give policymakers a clear, rigorous answer: this approach has a proven effect, that one does not, and here is what it costs per job created. Without that analysis, money is wasted on ineffective programmes while effective ones remain underused. If the centre succeeds, local economic policy will shift from hunches to hard evidence. A council considering a new enterprise zone could check the centre’s findings and choose a better option—saving public money and delivering more jobs. The centre also trains officials to run their own robust evaluations, building a permanent culture of evidence use. A new £2 million Stimulus Fund will fund partnership evaluations and embed evaluation experts inside local government, making the change self-sustaining. The result is not a single breakthrough but a quieter, more durable improvement in how public money is spent on local economies across the UK.
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The What Works Centre for Local Economic Growth was set up in October 2013 as part of the What Works network to analyse which policies are most effective in supporting and increasing local economic growth. The overall aim of the Centre is 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. This proposal covers a new phase of activity to run over a further three years. It builds on the progress made in the last six years in providing evidence synthesis, communicating the evidence base to policymakers and improving and supporting the evaluation of specific policies by both local and central government. We have learned a great deal over the past six years about how to make our work useful without losing academic rigour, and what forms of support and advice are preferred by our users. We have also built an extensive community of practice for evidence-based policy making. This experience has been invaluable in setting out our plans for the future. The Centre is committed to helping users to access and understand the evidence about what works. During the first six years, the Centre has developed a wide range of resources to help deliver on this objective. The Centre's evidence reviews consider a specific type of evidence - impact evaluation - that seeks to understand the causal effect of policy interventions and to establish their cost-effectiveness. The Centre will undertake work to ensure that our evidence reviews continue to offer the most useful advice based on the most robust and appropriate evidence. There will be a focus on reviewing UK-specific evaluations in those policy areas where enough UK-specific studies are available. In addition to the evidence reviews, we have also developed many toolkits which aim to inform specific aspects of policy design. They are intended to help policymakers understand how much is known about effectiveness, value for money, and key considerations associated with each approach. The Centre will further develop our toolkits to ensure that they draw on the latest evaluations available. We are planning a range of activities aimed at getting more academic researchers involved with the work of the Centre, both topic specialists and those with expertise in specific evaluation methods and datasets. We provide a range of evaluation resources including our 'How to Evaluate' series and evaluation case studies to help improve the capacity of policymakers to produce robust evaluation and embed the use of evidence in the policy design process. We will continue to up-date and develop the range of resources available to meet user needs. We also run workshops about the evidence base and how to robustly pilot and test programmes and investments. We will continue the current programme, running bespoke sessions every month and open access sessions quarterly. We will undertake additional activities to expand our capacity building work with users by: - Funding a number of high-quality partnership evaluations; - Better resourcing our current evaluation support offer through the establishment of a panel of evaluation experts, recruited through an open call; - Engaging a new set of local government partners in special projects. These activities will be funded through a new £2m Stimulus Fund. The overall aim of the Stimulus Fund will be to facilitate more direct engagement and collaboration in identifying, developing and implementing policy evaluations and other special projects in support of the Centre's strategic objectives. The proposal identifies a number of broad thematic areas where national and local decision-makers will be in most need of new advice. We propose to address each of the thematic areas through a variety of activities.
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