Evaluation in Government Policy-making

Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Excerpts

Monday 18th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Twycross (Lab)]

The Autumn Budget announced a new public sector reform and innovation fund, which will support the development of new approaches to improving public services. This will deploy £100 million over the next three years to deliver innovative public service reforms in partnership with mayors and local leaders. The project’s primary focus is on experimentation and learning and will complement ongoing reform programmes and activities delivered by departments. Of course, evaluation—good evaluation—will continue to be key.

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab)]

My Lords, is it not very clear that the Government are looking to make sure that evidence-based policy-making and evaluation become the norm? When I was last in government, I introduced numerous evidence-based programmes that were nearly all abandoned by successive Governments, including the one that the noble Lord who asked the Question was a member of. We have lost evidence-based policy-making that would have meant that today we had fewer children in care. Through supporting the evidence base for early intervention, fewer of them would have needed to go into care; that was proved through the evaluation. How are we going to get back to that sort of position?

[Baroness Twycross (Lab)]

This Government intend to use evaluation and evidence-based policy-making as the norm. We want to get away from the position we saw under the previous Government, where political decisions—including the Rwanda scheme—were more about newspaper headlines than value for money for taxpayers.