Regeneration - How do we know its working?
Regeneration programmes are failing to reduce inequalities because they are good at measuring things that make no difference to the lives of local people – and poor at measuring things that do.
Research by the New Economics Foundation think tank, published this week, said government was repeating mistakes of the past because it had never fully challenged two key assumptions. One, that outputs provide a true measure of change and two, that there is a direct cause and effect relationship between investment and the achievement of policy objectives. These assumptions are reflected in performance measures that exaggerate the success of initiatives and perpetuate their weaknesses time and again.
Focusing on the local enterprise growth initiative (Legi) scheme in St Helens, Merseyside, which was given more than £13m in government funding over a three-year period, the report showed how government measures focus on objectives that are either unrealistic or totally miss the point.
Full employment targets, for example, dominate the programme but are often irrelevant for people who have been excluded for a long time from the labour market and need to build their confidence in order to progress. Moreover, although the St Helens programme reported 829 jobs in the first year, the numbers on benefits in its priority areas actually increased.
The think tank concluded: ‘There is still a significant gap in the evidence about what works in relation to economic development policy. It is essential that policy becomes more informed and less political if we are to build the evidence base and use public investment as effectively as possible to combat inequality.’
The 2006 DTI review of the range of possible methods of evaluation available and relevant to RDA interventions demonstrated that some lend themselves quite readily to a project driven and responsive approach to intervention. The methods include case studies, non-experimental methods focused on specific projects and descriptive analysis of secondary and primary data.
However, it became clear from our consultations with the RDAs that they were consistently and systematically shifting away from this intervention approach towards one that was more strategic, outcome based and programme and partnership driven. In our view, this warrants a complementary transformation in the RDAs’ evaluative methods – to larger scale, more ambitious, technically more demanding programmes of evaluation.
The current position is that RDA evaluation activity has been and still is largely focused on assessing project gross and net outputs. In large part, this can be done through the weaker forms of evaluative data collection and analysis.
Evaluating the impact of England’s Regional Development Agencies: Developing a Methodology and Evaluation Framework DTI 2006
Hitting the target, missing the point, neweconomics