Departments are getting better at evaluating their major projects, an internal review has found.
The review of the Government Major Projects Portfolio, carried out by the Evaluation Task Force, has found that 63% of major projects now have some form of evaluation plan in place, compared to 29% in 2019.
Published yesterday afternoon , the review also found that one-third of major projects now have a high-quality evaluation in place, compared to just 8% in 2019.
In a foreword to the review, which looked at the 2023-24 period, Cabinet Office minister Georgia Gould said the findings “represent significant progress from the past, but there is still a need for considerable further improvement which will require a cross-government effort”.
Of the 227 projects that were part of the GMPP in 2023-24, 144 of them (63%) provided evidence of some form of evaluation plans for the review. These ranged from mature evaluations that are already being implemented to those at an early stage of development.
A third (34%) of all GMPP projects were found to have good quality evaluation plans in place. The remaining two-thirds did not provide evidence of good quality evaluation plans, meaning that either no evaluation plan was provided, or existing plans were not found to meet the criteria for quality applied in this review.
The review found that evaluation coverage was typically better for higher-cost projects. The 34% of projects with robust evaluation plans represent £378bn in total cost, 45% of the total cost of the GMPP, while the 66% of projects that did not provide evidence of robust evaluation plans represent a total cost of £456bn, or 55% of the total.
The Evaluation Task Force said the findings showed that “there is still a significant gap in the coverage of suitable evaluation plans across the GMPP”.
The review identified several reasons for this gap, which fall into three categories:
- Operational challenges: Some projects did not leave enough time to design evaluations early on, making it hard to estimate their impact later. Others had trouble accessing or generating the data they needed
- Cultural challenges: Some senior staff and decision-makers view evaluation as a "luxury" or lower priority, rather than a necessary and valuable part of the delivery of major projects
- Resourcing challenges: Some projects did not secure the necessary resources – like staff, funding, and expertise – to carry out good quality evaluations.
The review also contains an action plan which aims to overcome these barriers and drive improvement of major project evaluation.
The plan will be led by the ETF, Treasury and the National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority, who will work with government departments and major project teams.
The action plan has four components:
- Evaluation governance: improve governance to make having an appropriate evaluation plan a requirement for spending approval in the Treasury Approval Process, and to monitor the ongoing design and delivery of the evaluation through the major project gateway process. The ETF will also work with departments to ensure these requirements are mirrored in internal governance processes within departments.
- Evaluation capability: improve evaluation skills across GMPP project teams and NISTA assurance teams through developing and sharing examples of best practice and tailored training resources.
- Embedding evaluation into project delivery: set out evaluation requirements for project delivery teams in the Teal Book and monitor compliance with requirements by using the Evaluation Registry, which is an online repository of all planned, ongoing and complete UK government evaluations.
- Promoting the value of evaluation: engage major project stakeholders across government, including evaluation and project delivery teams in departments, to take forward opportunities to promote evaluation and its value throughout the project lifecycle.
Gould said the action plan “will embed evaluation into all stages of the major-project lifecycle, so that evaluation becomes a ‘must do’ rather than a ‘nice to have’”.
The National Audit Office has previously warned that low levels of good quality evaluation of major projects mean the government “cannot have confidence” that billions of pounds of spending in various policy areas “is making a difference”.
And parliament's Public Accounts Committee, has said that "without proper evaluation, it’s impossible for government to know what works and what doesn’t, which puts value for money at risk".