Question to the Cabinet Office:

To ask His Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of the Civil Service capacity needed to provide robust evaluation of Government policies; and how they will address any identified gaps.

In 2021, the National Audit Office published a report on evaluating government spending. The report highlighted several challenges regarding the Civil Service’s capacity to evaluate government policies, including a skills gap in evaluation.

It is the responsibility of individual government departments and professions to ensure that they have the capacity and capability to evaluate their policies and programmes, and to address any capability gaps they may have.

To support departments, the Cabinet Office is taking steps to improve the skills of analysts and policy officials across the Civil Service. For example, the Evaluation Task Force has created the Evaluation Academy to address a cross-government skills gap and build evaluation capacity in the analytical profession. The Evaluation Academy comprises 10 modules including process, impact and value-for-money evaluation that are aligned to the Magenta Book, the government’s guidance on evaluation. The Academy has been run for two consecutive years and has already led to more than 2,000 civil servants receiving training on evaluation topics and methods. The Evaluation Task Force has also provided advice on evaluation methods for 382 government programmes worth a total value of £202 billion.

Additionally, the Government Skills Campus project is building and rolling out a new Civil Service wide digital platform which will log the skills of all civil servants, including evaluation skills. This will create a Civil Service-wide skills dataset allowing for even more data-driven workforce planning and targeted action on capability gaps. Roll out begins in 2025.