Introduction

What can policy do to increase local economic growth? This is a question that has challenged decision makers and academics for decades. It's also a fundamental question today, when the UK government has made economic growth one of its priorities – in the face of a decade of slower growth and tight budgets.

Research and evaluation have a crucial role to play in providing answers and increasing the effectiveness of policy making. Unfortunately, making sense and making use of the evidence is not easy, especially for those tasked with delivering better economic outcomes for their communities.

The What Works Centre for Local Economic Growth (known as What Works Growth) was founded in 2013 to work with policy makers and help address these challenges. This chapter summarises what we have learnt from our first three phases of activity.

Phase 1: Evidence reviews – what works?

An evidence centre needs evidence. So our first task was to review what is known about the impact of local economic policies. After developing, testing and iterating our review methodology, we published 14 reviews in two years covering areas including employment training, business advice, estate renewal, broadband and area-based policies. We would argue that was good progress for a small team (roughly five full-time staff) covering a vast policy literature. We made several key decisions early on that helped us do this, but which also had implications for our work that resonated well beyond this first phase.

Systematic evidence reviews

The first decision concerned the kind of reviews we would produce. For people to have some confidence in our objectivity we felt that the reviews had to be systematic – by which we meant rules-based and summarising all available literature that met those rules. But there are different ways to do systematic reviews. For example, the Alliance for Useful Evidence distinguishes between ‘exploratory’ approaches – describing who's doing what in different places – and ‘structured’ approaches, which draw on studies which use more formal methods to test policy effectiveness.

We decided to take a structured approach for several reasons. Most importantly, in 2013 exploratory work on local economic policy was common, with far fewer structured reviews – something which remains true today.