Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, whether his Department has used randomised controlled trials to test the effectiveness of its policies; and whether such trials have been used in the Phase 3 broadband pilots.

DCMS has an evaluation strategy which it uses to help determine appropriate and proportionate evaluations are in place for DCMS policies.

The objective of the Market Test pilots is to test the specific challenges of rolling out in the final 5% of the country. The solutions being tested were proposed by the market in an open procurement and projects were selected on the basis that they would deliver learnings about the technical and financial viability of the proposed solution. Locations were chosen to be representative of the hardest to reach areas - a randomised process was not required.