Research and analysis

East Riding of Yorkshire: UKSPF summary evaluation plan

Published 4 April 2025

Applies to England

Summary of the local place

East Riding of Yorkshire is amongst the most rural regional geographies in the UK. It is characterised by a mix of small towns and rural settlements. It borders the North Sea to the east and adjoins North Yorkshire to the north, north-west and west, and North Lincolnshire to the south. There are no cities in the East Riding of Yorkshire region. The largest towns in the area are Bridlington and Beverley. The topography of East Riding of Yorkshire is characterised by wide and low-lying plains and low chalk hills. The East Riding of Yorkshire Council is the Lead Local Authority (LLA) for the local implementation of the United Kingdom Shared Prosperity Fund (UKSPF).

Map of East Riding of Yorkshire

East Riding of Yorkshire has been allocated £10.4 million from the UKSPF over the period from April 2022 to March 2025 across the different investment priorities: ‘Communities and Place’ (£4,130,282), ‘Supporting Local Businesses’ (£3,212,329), and ‘People and Skills’ (£3,077,008). In addition, it received £1.9 million through the Rural England Prosperity Fund (REPF). The REPF is a rural top up to UKSPF providing capital grants to address the challenges that businesses and communities in rural areas face, covering the period from April 2023 to March 2025. The UKSPF interventions aim to improve infrastructure and the public realm, attract visitors, provide support for businesses and social enterprises, and reduce economic inactivity.

Methodological approach

The place level case study will focus on the whole LA area, due to the predominance of LA-wide intervention delivery across all UKSPF investment priorities. The case study will include a process, impact, and economic evaluation.

Process evaluation

To address the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) and East Riding of Yorkshire’s learning needs, the study will include a process evaluation. The purpose of the process evaluation is to answer questions on 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 evolution of the local context at the interim and final stages
• analysis of Monitoring Information (MI) to gather evidence on the progress of East Riding of Yorkshire’s delivery of the programme
• stakeholder and beneficiary qualitative research to explore the set-up and implementation of the UKSPF investment in East Riding of Yorkshire
• a review of secondary data sources demonstrating the scale of local challenges and how East Riding of Yorkshire compares to other areas

Impact evaluation

The place level evaluation will focus on improvements in the public realm and infrastructure, improving business and enterprise capacity, and community engagement. Given this focus and the scale of local interventions, quasi-experiment designs (QED) would in most cases not be feasible. However, there is one potential QED approach, exploring the impact of CCTV infrastructure on crime. Most of the impact evaluation will draw on primary research methods (presented below) and utilise contribution analysis. The research team will develop a contribution or performance narrative for outcomes expected to be achieved in East Riding of Yorkshire. The analysis will test the Theory of Change and include:

• Management information, which will provide data on the progress towards, and achievement of outcomes as outlined in the Investment Plan.
• Primary research with a range stakeholders to capture data on outcomes and to critically allow exploration of why outcomes have or have not been achieved. Examples of stakeholders are key delivery partners and contractors, such as Humber Learning Consortium and relevant Town Councils.
• Primary research with beneficiaries to allow more in-depth exploration of the outcomes achieved.
• Quasi-experimental design where feasible, to assess impact of CCTV installations on crime rates using geographically granular data from police records and the Crime Survey for England and Wales.
• Meta-evaluation of East Riding of Yorkshire’s own commissioned evaluations, where available, and internal project-level evaluations to provide important learning about the efficacy of interventions, addressing research questions in both the process and impact evaluation frameworks. This will include building on work done to date on the Communities and Place investment priority, where evaluation is more challenging and social value approaches have been applied.
• There are potential limitations in using secondary data sources in terms of attribution of change to UKSPF activities. Nonetheless, many of these datasets (as outlined below) will be able to provide useful contextual information to support the evaluation.

Economic evaluation

The evaluation in East Riding of Yorkshire 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

Primary data collection

The case study will employ a mixed methods approach to data collection. It will include stakeholder consultations and in-depth qualitative work with stakeholders (including strategic, operational and frontline stakeholders) and research with beneficiaries (citizens, local business leaders, VCSE’s and individuals accessing support or benefitting from improvements to the local area). This data collection will capture evidence on the overall delivery and explore in-depth the operation and outcomes of interventions and the investment. To engage the different stakeholder groups, we will employ a range of qualitative approaches allowing us to offer flexibility in the ways stakeholders participate. This will include where appropriate individual, paired or small-group interviews and focus groups.

In addition to qualitative approaches to primary data collection, the case study will utilise survey methodologies to gather insights at scale and to derive more generalisable findings. Survey methodologies are more suited to gathering experiences of businesses receiving support and beneficiaries of interventions delivered to increase employability, community participation and engagement.

Secondary data sources

Themes	Data Sources
Improving businesses and community capacity building	■ Business Structure Database (BSD)[footnote 1] ■ Annual Business Survey (ABS) ■ MI collected by the Supporting Local Business interventions
Increasing employability, community participation and engagement	■ UK Employer Skills Survey (ESS)[footnote 2] ■ Claimant Count (DWP/ONS) ■ Annual Population Survey (APS) ■ MI collected by the People and Skills interventions
Public realm improvements, digital connectivity, accessibility and visitor economy	■ Local data on footfall and visitor data ■ Annual Population Survey/Understanding Society ■ Community Life survey ■ Wi-Fi and CCTV data ■ MI collected by East Riding of Yorkshire relating to cultural and creative events ■ Crime Survey for England and Wales (type of crime and resident experience) ■ Police data (crime reporting)

1. The use of these datasets is dependent on data release dates and alignment with intervention delivery. ↩

2. Ibid. ↩