LBRO - Impacts and Outcomes Toolkit

Report and Toolkit

In negotiations about budgets, it is important to be able to clearly demonstrate the benefits arising from work. This is particularly true for local authority regulatory services, given their direct impact on businesses and consumers. The development of a robust evidence base for this purpose is the aim of our impacts and outcomes report. This was produced both to assist in the evaluation of regulatory services and to address a perceived lack of knowledge among policy makers of the added value they provide.

The report, commissioned from RAND Europe, is based on detailed interviews and workshops with regulatory services, and builds on current practice. It reaches a number of pertinent conclusions, but its core is the toolkit: a step by step guide to how to select and develop meaningful indicators to assess the impacts and outcomes of operations, and how to gather and display the resulting information.

Using the toolkit will increase awareness of regulatory services, as well as allowing services to engage in more informed discussions about priorities and the allocation of resources. If desired, it can be used to exchange ideas and learning, and to create a high-level evaluation framework for further research and analysis. Ultimately, the toolkit will allow regulatory services to play a more prominent role in local strategic partnerships.

Impacts and Outcomes Toolkit (21/10/2009 PDF - 1.6 MB / 72 pages)

Impacts and Outcomes Report (21/10/2009 - 2.4 MB / 172 pages)

One key aim is to generate straightforward summaries of the vital contributions that activities make to communities, using a graphical representation of the feedback from key indicators, on a single page divided into four quadrants. An example follows for reference.