Research and analysis

Tamworth: UKSPF summary evaluation plan

Published 16 October 2024

Applies to England

Summary of the local place

Tamworth is a district of Staffordshire to the north-east of Birmingham in the West Midlands region. Focused on a central market town, it is the smallest borough council in the wider Staffordshire County Council area. Tamworth is entirely made-up of areas classified as ‘urban’.

Map of Tamworth

Tamworth has received £2.3 million of UKSPF, which is being used across the three investment priorities: Communities and Place (£1.4 million), Supporting Local Business (£350,000) and People and Skills (£550,000).

Interventions along the ‘Communities and Place’ investment priority follow two interlinked goals: supporting place, tourism and heritage; and supporting voluntary and community groups. Interventions along the ‘Supporting Local Businesses’ investment priority have been primarily related to investment in improvements to town centre retail and service sector infrastructure and funding for training hubs, business support offers, and ‘incubators’ and ‘accelerators’ for local enterprise. One main intervention along the ‘People and Skills’ investment priority has been designed that will provide employment support for economically inactive people, courses for basic life skills and support for digital inclusion.

Unit of analysis

The place level evaluation of Tamworth will focus on the whole local authority area due to the predominance of local authority-wide delivery of interventions and overall small size of Tamworth. It will look across all three investment priorities. There is also no locally commissioned evaluation activity planned in Tamworth which is a further case for this evaluation covering the entire local authority.

Methodological approach

Process evaluation

To address MHCLG and Tamworth local authority learning needs, 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 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 MI to gather evidence on the progress of Tamworth’s delivery of the programme.

• Stakeholder and beneficiary qualitative research to explore the set-up and implementation of the UKSPF investment in Tamworth.

Impact evaluation

Following detailed review and evaluability assessment, it is not feasible or proportionate to deliver Quasi Experimental Design (QED) approaches in Tamworth during the case study delivery period due to:

• The small scale of the activity in Tamworth means interventions in Tamworth are not expected to generate a large enough impact for the effects to be clearly seen in several secondary datasets.

• Community and place interventions and business support interventions are concentrated on Tamworth town centre. As the only town in the local authority area there is no readily available comparison within the local authority.

• Where there is a defined population accessing interventions there are challenges in attribution.

Timing of delivery is a challenge providing limited time for outcomes and impacts to be achieved and measured.

Contribution analysis will be used to assess what changes have taken place in Tamworth, how UKSPF has contributed to outcome achievement and how and why. The research team will develop a contributions, or performance story, for outcomes expected to be achieved in Tamworth, linked to the Theory of Change using:

• Management information will provide data on the progress towards and achievement of outcomes as outlined in Tamworth’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: Likewise, research with beneficiaries will allow more in-depth exploration of the outcomes achieved.

There are potential limitations in using secondary data sources e.g. the scale of the activity in Tamworth. 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.

Economic evaluation

The evaluation in Tamworth 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

Stakeholder consultations and depth qualitative work will comprise research with stakeholders (including strategic, operational and frontline stakeholders) and research with beneficiaries (citizens, local business leaders, individuals accessing support). This data collection will capture evidence on the overall delivery and explore in depth the operation and outcomes of interventions and the investment as a whole. 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 Individual, paired or small group interviews, focus groups, surveys and observations.

Secondary data sources

The following secondary sources of data will be used:

• Local data on footfall collected by local authority
• Community Life Survey
• Visitor data from Tamworth Castle or Visit Britain / England visitor attractions dataset
• Your Community, Your Say
• Business Structure Database  - small scale of business support activity in Tamworth may not be detectable in this dataset
• Claimant count data or Annual Population Survey  - small scale of P&S activity in Tamworth may not be detectable in these datasets
• Annual Population Survey /Understanding Society or Community Life Survey