Question to the Cabinet Office:

To ask His Majesty's Government what steps they are taking to improve the evaluation of their policies, and what progress has been made on the work of the Evaluation Task Force.

The Evaluation Task Force (ETF), set up in April 2021, has provided advice on 211 evaluations covering £115bn of Government spending. It has also launched the £15m Evaluation Accelerator Fund through which more than 20 evaluations have been funded in priority areas.

The ETF is currently updating the Government's major projects review with the hope that all new major programmes in Government will have a robust evaluation in place by 2023

By launching the Evaluation Registry the ETF will provide a single repository of evaluations of UK Government programmes, policies and projects. The Registry has been preloaded with over 2,000 existing Government evaluation reports, making it one of the largest sources of policy evidence in the world.

Finally, the ETF has set up and delivered the Evaluation Academy to 42 Civil Servants in 13 ministerial departments and the Scottish Government. These delegates have gone on to share this expertise by training over 1,100 civil servants in their respective Departments, creating free and sustainable evaluation training.