Assessments should be intelligence rich

Author: Neil McInroy, LGC - Oct 15, 2009

I have been visiting local Authority members of CLES and other organisations this week as part of the Centre’seconomic resilience work. Part of this work will involve developing a strategic and directional evidence base. This work is aiming to ‘snuggle’ with the newLocal Economic Assessments(LEAs)

Collecting evidence and using this to direct policy and strategy is key to creating successful interventions. However, through LEAs, we may be falling into an information trap, where we expend much capacity, resources and energy to so called ‘evidence’, but in reality we are just collecting data and collating information. Let’s not forget, we are not information poor. We have lots of information in the UK. As an senior academic colleague, who has worked in policy research for a number of years put to me last week, we are ‘information rich, but intelligence poor’.

Assessment cannot be about collecting and shuffling data together to create a mountain of ‘information’. Assessments have to be about prioritisation, analysis and exploration of how this evidence relates to, and in practice works with strategy and policy. In short assessments need to be intelligence ‘rich’.

The draft statutory guidancefrom Communities and Local Government and the‘How to do a Local Economic Assessment’issued by I&DeA, whilst helpful in parts, does not do enough to avert us from intelligence poor assessments. The ‘how to’ document is 60 pages in length and is in danger of sending out a message which says this is process heavy, rather than an opportunity to rethink how we do local economics. These documents tend to hone in on the ‘information’ aspects to evidence, without giving due regards to intelligence and how one needs to locally frame and fetter the extent of information as part of an effective evidence base.

As advocated in our call for a new wave ofLocal economic activism, true place resilience is about priorities and creating a bespoke economic destiny of place which has ‘intelligence’ inbuilt and confronts those wicked issues such as growth, the environment, recycling wealth, and developing skills to match future economic need. Economic development is not synonymous with growth and is not value neutral. It’s about a set of strategic decisions.

Of course, a broad picture based on information is required. However, this has to be light touch. More importantly, the assessment process must have an iterative process at its heart, informed and learning from previous work, creating a culture whereby evidence is constantly interrogated in relation to priorities, strategy and policy solutions. This requires active leadership in the assessment process, reflecting these high end priorities. This will inevitably create a culture, which is less siloed, more corporate and has embedded methods for honing on priority themes.

Without this rigour and approach, the assessment process is likely to eat up resources, create a load of generic descriptive information with lots of frequencies, graphs and tables and be detached from local government strategy.

Whilst many Local authorities are aware of and look to be avoiding this trap, I fear that, for some, the immediate time pressure associated with the Local Economic Assessments process, on top of depleted economic development departments, will mean that many may inadvertently fall into it. This is ever more likely if a slavish following of the guidance takes place or the assessment is contracted out to ‘generic’ consultancy offers.

We must work hard to avert this,as tackling the many economic, social and environmental challenges our localities face, require a wave of local economic activism. This activism, is evidence led and fed by strategic prioritisation linked to differentiated local economic strategies and policies.

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