Research and analysis

Glasgow City Region: UKSPF summary evaluation plan

Published 4 April 2025

Applies to Scotland

Summary of the local place

The Glasgow City Region (GCR) is made up of eight Member Authorities (MAs): East Dunbartonshire, East Renfrewshire, Glasgow City Council, Inverclyde, North Lanarkshire, Renfrewshire, South Lanarkshire, and West Dunbartonshire. GCR is the fourth largest city region in the UK, home to 1.8 million residents which is roughly a third of Scotland’s population.

GCR has a rich international trade heritage through Port Glasgow, and strong creative, business and innovation economies. However, there are significant challenges relating to:

• worsening rates of business survival
• variable levels of business productivity across MAs
• low research and development spend relative to the rest of the UK

Furthermore, GCR is facing challenges around high levels of economic inactivity, driven by long-term sickness and lack of skills. In many of GCR’s MAs the proportion of people aged 16-64 who have no formal qualifications is above the Scottish average, and women and ethnic minorities are disproportionately represented among those without qualifications. This contributes towards a higher-than-average incidence of deprivation in GCR, with one quarter of the region’s population living within the 15% most deprived areas of Scotland.

The GCR funding landscape is complex, with funding being accessed through different sources, including the 2014 City Deal, which unlocked more than £1 billion in infrastructure investment. Other sources of significant investment from the UK government include the Innovation and Research Accelerator pilot scheme, the Investment Zones in Scotland scheme, and the 5G Innovation Regions scheme.

The funding allocation from the UK government through the UK Shared Prosperity Fund (UKSPF) for GCR over the 3-year programme is £58.7 million (excluding Multiply funding). This includes £23.1 million allocated to the Communities and Place investment priority, £14.7 million to the Supporting Businesses investment priority and £23.3 million to the People and Skills investment priority. In addition, GCR MAs have been able to leverage match funding of approximately £30 million, with contributions from Scottish Government, private sector and National Lottery, as well as MAs themselves.

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Map of Glasgow City Region

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Unit of analysis

Almost all UKSPF is being delivered independently by the eight constituent MAs within GCR. Although the exact interventions are tailored to suit the individual MAs’ strengths and needs, there are similarities in the suites of interventions being delivered by MAs and the outcomes which they aim to achieve. As a result, the unit of analysis for this evaluation will be the whole of Glasgow City Region.

Given the size of Glasgow City Region and the number of interventions UKSPF has funded, the evaluation will focus on a subset of the interventions being delivered across the city. The evaluation will cover interventions across all three investment priorities. Interventions which were known not to be delivering during the evaluation inception phase have been discounted, as the long-term outcomes for these interventions are not expected to be observable during the case study research period. As there were some similarities between each MA’s approach, the evaluation will focus on outcomes which were being addressed by interventions in five or more MAs. The evaluation team 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 should be expected to have measurable impacts on outcomes. The high-level evaluation themes are:

• promoting inclusive participation in the labour market
• creating a high-quality, accessible physical environment to promote usage of facilities
• promoting innovation and knowledge sharing to address emerging business challenges

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 socio-economic context at the interim and final stages of UKSPF
• a review of local documentation, including the GCR investment plan, regional strategies and action plans, local authority commissioning and procurement documentation to provide background information to the process evaluation
• analysis of monitoring information (MI) to evidence GCR’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 GCR

Impact evaluation

An internal assessment of the opportunities for developing counterfactuals and quasi-experimental designs (QEDs) to impact evaluation has been undertaken. 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 GCR, the Intelligence Hub, and individual MAs:

• Matching with Difference in Difference (Supporting Local Businesses) – comparing change in metrics between successful applicants to business support interventions (Digital Development, Business Expert Help programmes, and Carbon Baseline Reports), 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 GCR, 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 GCR, linked to the Theory of Change using:

• Management information, which will provide data on the progress towards, and achievement of outcomes as outlined in GCR’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 GCR case study 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 GCR residents ■ Quantitative survey of businesses receiving support	■ UKSPF monitoring data reported by the delivery partners ■ Local data on footfall collected by MAs ■ Local tourism and visitor figures collected by MAs ■ Police Scotland crime data ■ Business Structure Database ■ Companies House ■ Office for National Statistics (ONS) Local indicators ■ ‘Your Community, Your Say’ survey