Question to the Cabinet Office:

To ask His Majesty's Government what standard of scientific evidence they require when commissioning internal and external evaluations of their policies and programmes; and whether they routinely require that an objective standard of evidence be met by, for example, mandating use of the Maryland Scientific Methods Scale or similar.

Evaluation is a Treasury requirement for all Government policies and programmes. All evaluations of Government policies and programmes must be carried out in line with the evaluation standards in the Magenta Book (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-magenta-book), which is Treasury guidance on how evaluations should be undertaken. Annex A of the Magenta Book details the analytical methods which can be used. All Ministerial Departments have published an evaluation strategy on GOV.UK (https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/evaluation-strategies-from-uk-government-departments), publicly setting out how they will meet the required standards.

The Evaluation Task Force (ETF) was established in 2021 with the aim of increasing the quality and quantity of evaluations conducted across Government. The ETF works closely with evaluation leads within Departments to advise on evaluation designs and application of evaluation methods and to ensure that Government evaluations are robust and are delivered to a high analytical standard. This involves identifying the most proportionate and robust method(s) suitable for each policy or programme in question.

The ETF does not have a routine set of requirements which Departments are held to, because the most appropriate method for each evaluation is specific to the policy and programme context. In some cases methods which score lower on the Maryland Scientific Methods Scale may represent the most robust and proportionate approaches for a Government policy or programme. While the ETF works with Departments to ensure that the most robust methods possible are applied to each policy or programme, this is done on a case-by-case basis rather than through the application of a scale or framework.