Publication of Steer-ED’s feasibility study for the evaluation of the Local Growth Fund and Getting Building Fund

The Department for Levelling-Up, Housing & Communities (DLUHC) commissioned Steer-ED to examine the feasibility of conducting process, impact and value for money evaluations of two large national local growth initiatives. The Local Growth Fund was announced in 2013 and delivered a range of initiatives to support local economic growth and the Getting Building Fund was announced in 2020 as part of the Government’s response to COVID-19 and aimed at stimulating economic growth by investing in ‘shovel ready’ projects.

Steer-ED’s methodology included workshops, scoping interviews, document reviews, logic model development, refinement of project typologies, a literature review, scoping of secondary datasets, and expert interviews. The headline findings were:

• It was feasible to proceed with a process evaluation and this would offer valuable insights for future programmes.
• Many challenges were highlighted with completing impact and value for money evaluations and a feasibility assessment required further investigation.

The full feasibility report has now been published on Gov.uk and DLUHC have commissioned Steer-ED to undertake the process evaluation and to undertake a data gathering project with LEPs to support potential future impact evaluation activity.