Insights
Last week we held the first in our latest series of breakfast briefing webinars. This event focused on how local governments can prepare themselves to make the most of the devolution of local growth policy. Our remaining webinars are Economic inactivity: Thinking through local responses on 26th February, and The industrial strategy: Thinking through local responses on 5th March.
This blog recaps the key points of our first event. For more, you can watch a recording of the webinar on our YouTube channel.
Effective devolution: better local knowledge, and experimentation to find out what works
The English Devolution White Paper outlines two core arguments for how policy effectiveness can be improved by devolving powers and responsibilities to local government.
The first is that local policymakers are better able to understand problems and how to fix them in their areas:
“Devolution enables more decisions to be made by those who know their areas best, leading to better outcomes and a more efficient use of resources.” English Devolution White Paper, p.23
The second is that different places trying different policies helps us find out what works to the benefit of everywhere:
“Devolution done right drives innovation, enabling different leaders to trial different methods, and learn from what works to ultimately deliver more for citizens.” English Devolution White Paper, p.23
Success on these points isn’t a given. For the first, local places need to make effective use of data, evidence and economic thinking to identify and address the problems in local economies. For us all to collectively learn which approaches work best in doing this – the second point – there needs to be impact evaluation of local growth interventions, which can tell us whether they are having the intended impact on outcomes.
Local knowledge: effective use of data, evidence, and economic thinking
Acting on problems in a local economy to drive growth means first being able to harness key data to clearly understand those problems. Taking a “back to basics” approach with this is not only simpler but can also enable clearer thinking. This means first articulating which fundamental economic outcomes you are interested in – for example, employment, productivity, or wages – and then using the right data, with the right comparisons, to understand the situation in a local economy.
When considering a policy response, it is vital that these are based on evidence of effectiveness. Understanding different types of economic evidence and how to use them is essential – knowing the difference between using descriptive evidence to understand the situation, and causal evidence to understand which interventions can address it, can be the difference between good and bad policy approaches. Too often descriptive evidence is used to justify interventions without appropriate causal evidence to support them.
When an intervention is being scoped out, sense checking the evidence underlying it, the extent to which it is focusing on the key problem that originally inspired the process of developing it, and the core logic that runs through it is important. As policy is developed it can be easy for things to become overcomplicated and for the design of interventions to become muddled. Using a logic model to review a policy as it is being developed is one way to keep things focused.
Devolution experimentation: effective evaluation
As places have more discretion over local growth policy and can try different approaches to reach the same ultimate outcomes, there will inevitably be successes and failures. This is a good thing – but only if we can learn from it. Effective impact evaluation teaches us what works well, what works less well, and what doesn’t work at all. This not only benefits the individual places in deciding whether to scale up or cut back interventions; it benefits local growth policymakers across the UK. This requires thinking about evaluation early in the policy design process, developing the right questions for evaluation, and ensuring policy design and implementation is geared toward allowing measurement of whether it is working.
Realistically, for many local places longer-term impact evaluation will remain difficult and for this reason we believe that the new structures of local government and devolution will need to include a body which can help provide this function for local authorities.
Building your capacity for effectiveness now
Our training on Making use of evidence, Understanding how local economies work, Understanding data on local economic growth, Making use of logic models, Understanding impact evaluation, and Developing good evaluation questions covers the points above, and can help equip you with the core skills to effectively engage with these different elements.
For leaders, it will be important to understand how capacities in these areas currently stack up and to prioritise preparations for more responsibilities. Our evidence use maturity matrix provides a framework for assessing this capacity, and we can provide bespoke guidance on how to apply this, and how to act on what you find. If that is of interest, you can get in touch with our head of outreach Megan Streb at m.streb@whatworksgrowth.org.
