Research and analysis

Gateshead: UKSPF summary evaluation plan

Published 4 April 2025

Applies to England

Summary of the local place

The borough of Gateshead is located in the North East county of Tyne and Wear. It stretches almost 13 miles along the south bank of the River Tyne and covers 55 square miles, meaning that it is the largest of the five Tyne and Wear authorities. Gateshead has a large urban hub centred around the main Gateshead town centre area and has a number of smaller urban centres as Blaydon, Whickham, Felling and Birtley. However, around two thirds of the borough is rural with numerous small settlements.^{[footnote 1]}

Map of Gateshead

Gateshead received £11,634,467 of UK Shared Prosperity Fund (UKSPF) funding across the three investment priorities: ‘Communities and Place’ (£6,210,536), ‘Supporting Local Businesses’ (£3,512,609), and ‘People and Skills’ (£1,911,322). Gateshead was selected as it offers an opportunity to examine implementation in a medium size urban area, with a high per capita funding level. The area also received an additional £1,169,621 allocation for Multiply, via the Department for Education. Gateshead is not accessing Future High Street Fund or Rural England Prosperity Fund but was awarded £20 million from the Levelling Up Fund for the Gateshead Quays development.

Unit of analysis

The place level evaluation of Gateshead will focus on the whole Local Authority (LA) area and will look across all three investment priorities. However, due to the volume and focus of local evaluation activity there will be a focus on evaluation themes and in-depth examination of some intervention projects including:

• Communities and Skills: Tyne Derwent Way, Gateshead Marginalised Group Support and Sustainable Food.
• Supporting Local Businesses: Immex City, Local Women Local Enterprise and Yalla Lets Go.
• People and Skills: Positive steps, Gateshead Go Work Live, Work for Health, Diverse Pathways, Career Kickstart, Community Grants, Gateshead Go Volunteer, Empowering New and Emerging Communities

Methodological approach

Process evaluation

To address the learning needs of the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) and Gateshead, a process evaluation will be undertaken. 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 UKSPF funding. The process evaluation will include:

• a review of the evolution of the local socio-economic context at the interim and final stages
• analysis of MI to gather evidence on the progress of Gateshead’s delivery of the programme
• stakeholder and beneficiary qualitative research to explore the set-up and implementation of the UKSPF investment in Gateshead

Impact evaluation

It is not feasible to deliver QED approaches during the case study delivery period due to challenges in developing appropriate counterfactual cases, for example, due to targeted interventions under Supporting Local Businesses making it difficult to find a comparator group in the area and no equivalent town centre to compare outcomes of the Communities and Place activity in Gateshead town centre. Contribution analysis will be used to assess what changes have taken place in Gateshead, how UKSPF has contributed to outcome achievement and how and why. The research team will develop a contribution narrative, for outcomes expected to be achieved in Gateshead, linked to the Theory of Change (ToC) using:

• Management information will provide data on the progress towards, and achievement of outcomes as outlined in Gateshead’s Investment Plan.
• 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 will allow more in-depth exploration of the outcomes achieved.
• There are potential limitations in using secondary data sources, for example, due to the scale of some the activity in Gateshead, for example Local Women’s Enterprise business support intervention aiming to support the creation of less than 5 new jobs. Attribution is also an issue. Nonetheless, many of these datasets (as outlined below) will be able to provide useful contextual information to support the evaluation and serve as a source to triangulate findings as part of our contribution analysis.

Economic evaluation

The evaluation in Gateshead 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 following sources of data will be used:

Primary data collection	Secondary data sources
■ Consultations with stakeholders. ■ Qualitative research with beneficiaries, including interviews, focus groups and surveys. ■ ‘Your Community, Your Say’ survey.	■ Data collected by Gateshead Council (footfall, business creation). ■ Community Life Survey at Local Authority (LA) Level. ■ Business Structure Database (turnover, productivity, jobs). ■ Company’s House business survival database. ■ Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) Claimant Count data. ■ Annual Population Survey.

1. Gateshead Council About Gateshead webpage ↩