Research and analysis

City of Edinburgh: UKSPF summary evaluation plan

Published 4 April 2025

Applies to Scotland

Summary of the local place

Edinburgh, the capital city of Scotland, is known for its historic and cultural attractions, including Edinburgh Castle and the annual Edinburgh Festival. The city has a population of 525,000 residents, making it the second most populous city in Scotland.

Map of City of Edinburgh

Edinburgh is characterised by high levels of education, high levels of employment and a highly skilled workforce relative to the Scotland average. Despite being one of the wealthiest cities in the UK, there are deep inequalities in health and income, and high levels of poverty and deprivation. One in six residents live in relative poverty, and there is a life expectancy gap of 24 years between people living in the most deprived and most affluent areas of the city.^{[footnote 1]} Poverty and inequality have been exacerbated by the cost-of-living crisis and Covid-19 pandemic. Tackling these challenges is one of the main priorities of the Edinburgh Council’s Business Plan and End Poverty in Edinburgh Delivery Plan.

The UK Shared Prosperity Fund (UKSPF) is a three-year funding programme, running from April 2022 to March 2025, from which the City of Edinburgh has been allocated £12.4 million (including Multiply funding). This includes £5.4 million allocated to the Communities and Place investment priority, £1.8 million to the Supporting Local Businesses investment priority, £3.1 million to the People and Skills investment priority and £2.1 million to Multiply. Other sources of funding accessed by the City of Edinburgh include match funding from local authority contributions (£2.6 million allocated so far), and third parties (£3.2 million allocated so far).

Unit of analysis

The evaluation will cover interventions across all three investment priorities – ‘Communities and Place’, ‘Supporting Local Businesses’, and ‘People and Skills’, and cover the whole of the City of Edinburgh area. Given the size of the City of Edinburgh and the number of interventions UKSPF has funded, the evaluation will focus on a subset of the interventions being delivered across the city. Interventions which were not live by March 2024 have been discounted, as the long-term outcomes for these projects are not expected to be observable during the case study research period. We narrowed the remaining list of interventions to focus the evaluation on those which have been allocated large proportions of the funding for each investment priority, as these are expected to have measurable impacts on outcomes.

Methodological approach

Process evaluation

A process evaluation will be undertaken to explore the relevance, efficiency and effectiveness of fund design and interventions, and the efficiency and effectiveness of processes used to manage and deliver the Fund. The approach to the process evaluation will include:

• a review of the local context at the interim and final stages of UKSPF
• analysis of monitoring information (MI) to evidence Edinburgh’s progress of delivery of the programme
• stakeholder research and in-depth qualitative research to explore the set-up and implementation of the UKSPF investment in the City of Edinburgh

Impact evaluation

An internal assessment of the opportunities for developing counterfactuals and quasi-experimental designs (QEDs) to impact evaluation has been undertaken (discussed in more detail in Section 6.2.2). This assessment identified one potential candidate for a QED, the feasibility of which will be dependent on a more detailed review of the data held by the City of Edinburgh Council:

• Matching with Difference in Difference (Supporting Local Businesses) – comparing change in metrics between successful applicants to business support interventions, and unsuccessful applicants or comparable businesses which did not apply.

For interventions which are not suited to a QED, contribution analysis will be used to assess what changes have taken place in the City of Edinburgh, how UKSPF has contributed to outcome achievement and why. The research team will develop a contribution, or performance narrative, for outcomes expected to be achieved in the City of Edinburgh, linked to the Theory of Change using:

• management information, which will provide data on the progress towards, and achievement of outcomes as outlined in City of Edinburgh’s Investment Plan
• secondary data sources, which will be assessed case-by-case for their potential to robustly identify additional outcomes and impacts of UKSPF interventions
• primary research with stakeholders to capture data on outcomes from the perspective of stakeholders and critically allow exploration of why outcomes have or have not been achieved
• primary research with beneficiaries to allow a more in-depth exploration of the outcomes achieved. Approaches including interviews, focus groups and surveys will be used to collect views from participants of interventions being examined

Economic evaluation

The evaluation in the City of Edinburgh will include a value for money assessment following the National Audit Office 4E’s approach, assessing the economy, efficiency, effectiveness and equity of the UKSPF interventions.

Data to support the evaluation

The table below outlines the range of primary and secondary data sources that will be used in the evaluation, aligned with priority outcomes for this case study.

Primary data collection

Secondary data sources

■ Interviews with stakeholders ■ Qualitative research with beneficiaries, including interviews and focus groups. ■ Quantitative surveys of Edinburgh residents ■ Quantitative survey of businesses receiving support

■ UKSPF monitoring data reported by the delivery partners ■ Edinburgh Business Gateway data ■ Scottish Household Survey ■ Scottish Welfare Fund data ■ Social media data held by Edinburgh Council ■ ONS Local indicators for Edinburgh: Active businesses, business births, business deaths, high growth businesses ■ Business Structure Database ■ ‘Your Community, Your Say’ survey ■ Council Performance Scorecard ■ Trussel Trust and other food banks’ data ■ Annual population survey ■ Claimant count data

1. Briefing note: Baseline Evidence (2018) Edinburgh Poverty Commission.(PDF 575KB) ↩