Evaluation of North London City Growth

Management Focus were commissioned by the London Development Agency to undertake an evaluation of the North London City Growth programme using the RDA Impact Evaluation Framework.  In addition to establishing the economic impact, LDA were keen to understand the extent to which their investment and policy leadership had generated Strategic Added Value.  Specifically, they wanted to find out if they had managed to get public agencies to work together more effectively, focus on effective outcomes - rather than merely meeting contractual output targets and engage the private sector in delivering business support.

The work involved:

• Developing a logic chain for the programme
• Carrying out interviews with a range of stakeholders
• Assessing the project outputs against plan
• Undertaking a statistically robust survey of the participating businesses
• Preparing case studies to illustrate key issues and lessons learned
• Carrying out a full gross to net analysis to take account of deadweight, leakage, substitution, displacement and multiplier effects
• Carrying out a value for money assessment
• Reviewing the overall management of the programme
• Assessing Strategic Added Value and LDA’s influence
• Generating a series of lessons learned including ‘what they should have done more of and what they should have done less of’.

The evaluation process and our knowledge of City Growth meant that we were able to investigate the programme in depth despite the limited timescale and potential sensitivities.