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This report presents the final feasibility assessment regarding evaluation of two major UK government funding programmes: the Local Growth Fund and the Getting Building Fund. Commissioned by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government in April 2023, the study was conducted by Steer Economic Development (Steer-ED) to determine the viability of conducting process, impact, and value for money evaluations for both funds.

The viability of process evaluation was confirmed in an initial feasibility assessment, and was then commissioned and undertaken. This report therefore focuses on the viability of impact and value for money evaluations.

Methodology

A 5-stage approach was adopted to produce the recommendations within this study:

Develop policy understanding – developing programme and intervention logic models and project typologies

Explore methodological options – via review of evaluation literature and interviews with experts to discuss best-practice approaches (including representatives from the Office for National Statistics, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, What Works Centre for Local Economic Growth, a Local Enterprise Partnership, and an academic econometrician)

Assess available data – consolidation and review of data held by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, and consideration of potential uses of secondary data sources

Local data gathering – interviews with Local Enterprise Partnerships to discuss data availability, followed-up with data requests to all Local Enterprise Partnerships to gather this data

Develop final recommendations – internal expert discussions and consideration of methodological options, considering feasibility, advantages and disadvantages, given findings from previous work.

Challenges

The feasibility investigations uncovered several key challenges associated with evaluation of Local Growth Fund and Getting Building Fund interventions. These include:

• the wide range of intervention types supported, resulting in a correspondingly diverse set of outputs – meaning that no single evaluation approach could effectively address all of the interventions
• the lack of a suitable area-level counterfactual (since all areas received funding)
• a range of confounding factors, in particular the COVID-19 pandemic
• the presence of complex interaction effects, with portfolios designed to deliver complementary selections of projects.

Proposed approaches

In response to the challenges raised, a mixed-methods tiered evaluation approach was initially proposed. This approach would provide the opportunity to use rigorous quasi-experimental methods at the intervention level, combined with qualitative study of synergistic benefits at the programme level. However, following collection of data from Local Enterprise Partnerships, it transpired that insufficient intervention-level data was held to build a national picture of Local Growth Fund and Getting Building Fund interventions. This data was found to only be available for a select group of areas, meaning that quasi-experimental analysis would be possible for only a relatively narrow selection of interventions and areas.

A revised approach was explored, which did not seek to provide programme-level insights, but instead concentrated on a more limited assessment, focusing on a selection of Local Enterprise Partnerships, and making use of quasi-experimental methods only in the limited situations for which such data was available. However, some concerns remained with this revised approach. These include the limited insights that would be drawn from this methodology, and some outstanding feasibility challenges. Given these concerns, and departmental priorities in light of the 2025 Spending Review, ultimately this alternative option was not considered a value for money investment.

Final evaluation approach

Instead, a lighter-touch option was pursued: the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government commissioned Steer-ED to undertake a set of impact-focused area-based case studies. This permitted the development of a set of rapid, qualitative assessments of Local Growth Fund and Getting Building Fund impacts, focussing on the role of the single pot. The case studies were commissioned and prepared to inform the 2025 Spending Review discussion and are published separately.