About us
We are a joint Cabinet Office-HM Treasury unit providing specialist support to ensure evidence and evaluation sits at the heart of spending decisions.
Who we are
The Evaluation Task Force (ETF), a joint Cabinet Office (CO) and His Majesty’s Treasury (HMT) unit, was set up following the 2020 Spending Review to improve people’s lives by ensuring robust evidence on the effectiveness of policies and programmes sits at the heart of government spending decisions.
The ETF is part of the government’s commitment to Modernisation and Reform, to better deliver services to the public.
The ETF is also part of the Cabinet Office Delivery Group that represents the drive for a shared, central Government delivery function. The directorate spans across No10 and Cabinet Office, and comprises:
- the Evaluation Task Force (ETF);
- the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit (PMDU);
- the No10 Data Science team (10DS);
- i.AI (the Incubator for Automation and Innovation);
- the Government Strategic Management Office (GSMO); and
- the Delivery Architecture team (currently being set up).
Aim and mission
The ETF’s purpose is to drive continuous improvements in the way government programmes are evaluated in order to inform decisions on whether they should be continued, expanded, modified or stopped. These decisions should improve public sector outcomes.
What we do
The ETF delivers a range of activities to tackle the main barriers to robust evaluations in government and foster a culture of evaluation and experimentation. These activities include:
- providing advice and support to HM Treasury Spending Teams, on the evidence and evaluation plans underpinning departments’ spending proposals to inform HMT spending decisions
- providing advice and support to government departments on designing and delivering robust, impact evaluation
- encouraging and challenging departments to be transparent with their data and evaluation plans and findings
- building relationships with key stakeholders across government, including the policy, analytical and finance professions to promote evidence-based policy
Our Theory of Change sets out our planned activities and illustrates how our activities lead to the intended outcomes.
An example of ETF activity: 2021 Spending Review
During the recent Spending Review, the ETF worked closely with HMT Spending Teams to consider the quality of evidence underpinning departments’ spending proposals and check whether departments are exploiting counterfactual approaches to understand if their idea works.
We reviewed over 80 proposals and worked with HMT to set evaluation conditions in departments’ spending settlements to improve the quality of evaluation for funded programmes.
Going forward, the ETF will be monitoring the delivery of funded interventions to ensure they are rigorously evaluated and to inform future spending decisions.
Evaluation in government
What is policy evaluation?
Evaluation is a key part of how the government designs and delivers policy. Government departments are expected to undertake comprehensive, robust and proportionate evaluations of their policy interventions in order to understand how government policies are working and to ensure the best value of public money.
The government’s Magenta Book sets out government guidance on evaluation. It differentiates between process, impact and value for money evaluations. The Evaluation Task Force is principally focused on impact and value-for-money evaluations.
How does evaluation work in government?
The responsibility for evaluating a policy resides with the government department responsible for the policy. Analysts within the department lead the design and delivery of the evaluation, working closely with policy and delivery officials.
To promote the use of evidence and ensure robust evaluation of policies, departments have various internal systems and structures in place. These include:
- evaluation governance boards and strategies to ensure strategic oversight of evaluation activities in departments, and to ensure key evidence gaps are filled
- central evaluation teams to provide policy and analytical teams with evaluation expertise and support
- internal and external scrutiny processes to ensure evaluations are designed in a robust and proportionate way
Directors of Analysis and Chief Scientific Advisers oversee the evaluation delivery, prioritisation, staffing and budgets within their respective departments.
Who are the key evaluation players in government?
There are several central teams and cross-government functions which provide departments with oversight and support to design and deliver robust evaluations across government.
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The Evaluation Task Force (ETF), a central Cabinet Office and HMT unit, supports and challenges departments on their use of evaluation evidence, prioritisation, policy and evaluation design and supports spending teams to make spending decisions informed by evidence. The team aims to build support for evaluation across stakeholders in government and advocates for sufficient funding for robust impact evaluations of government policies. It also provides departments with access to external advice and evaluation support via the Evaluation and Trial Advice Panel and the What Works Network. You can email the Evaluation Task Force here: etf@cabinetoffice.gov.uk
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The Evaluation and Trial Advice Panel is a panel of government and external evaluation experts providing specialist advice to government teams that are designing and delivering an impact evaluation. The service is available to civil servants across government. You can email the Evaluation and Trial Advice Panel here: trialadvicepanel@cabinetoffice.gov.uk
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The What Works Network is a network of research centres covering a range of policy areas from education to crime to health. Centres ensure the best available evidence on “what works” is available to decision-makers and offer advice to government departments on effective practice. Where evidence is weak or unavailable, these organisations seek to help decision-makers by supporting new evaluations and trials that fill priority evidence gaps. The network is led by the National What Works Adviser, David Halpern, who advises ministers, champions the effective use of robust evaluation across government, and promotes social science through the What Works Initiative.
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The Government Analysis Function and Analytical Professions set professional standards for planning and undertaking analysis, publish guidance on best practice, and provide bespoke support to analysts, all to improve analytical capability. The Analysis Function Evaluation Support Team collaborates with evaluation specialists to develop cross-government guidance on evaluation best practices and provide bespoke evaluation support to analysts across government. The team focuses on building evaluation capability across government and can provide targeted training and support for departments or teams which would benefit from developing their fundamental evaluation skills. You can email the Government Analysis Function here: evaluation.support@statistics.gov.uk
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The Evaluation Strategy Group aims to coordinate strategic evaluation activities across government, ensuring the work of the government’s key evaluation players is joined up, cumulative in nature, and avoids duplication. Activities include: developing a coordinated programme of strategic evaluation activities; considering strategic gaps in evaluation in government and identifying steps to address these; working together to unblock cross-government issues and engaging with key stakeholders to improve quality and transparency; and showcasing top quality evaluations.
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The Cross-Government Evaluation Group (CGEG) comprises evaluation leads from government departments and national governments. It aims to improve the supply of, stimulate demand for, and encourage the use of, good quality evaluation to inform the policy development process in order to achieve better outcomes for the public. It does this by representing departmental viewpoints in the development of government evaluation, sharing good practices and delivering improvement projects such as the 2020 revision to the Magenta Book: Central Government guidance on evaluation.
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Government Social Research (GSR) is the analytical profession within government for Civil Servants who generate and provide social and behavioural research and advice. GSR members support policy debate, design and decision-making through a variety of approaches including evaluation.
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Government Economics Service (GES) is the analytical profession within government for civil servants who generate and provide economic advice which supports policy debate, design and decision making.
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The Green Book is guidance issued by HM Treasury on how to appraise policies, programmes and projects. It provides guidance on the design and use of monitoring and evaluation before, during and after implementation. The Green Book is owned by HM Treasury. To support users of the Green Book, HM Treasury has published various materials and supplementary guidance, which can be found here.
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The Policy Profession designs, develops and proposes appropriate courses of action to help meet key government priorities and ministerial objectives.
Stay connected
Stay up to date with Evaluation Task Force news:
- email etf@cabinetoffice.gov.uk to get in touch with the team.