Scottish Government Evaluation Action Plan

Foreword

The Scottish Government continues to face many challenges, from prioritising limited resources, to developing and reforming services so they are efficient and person-centred, with decisions increasingly made in a complex, inter-connected and rapidly changing environment.

Good quality evaluation will help us tackle these challenges by providing credible, impartial evidence about how, and why policy is working, and in turn help us make better decisions.

By helping us learn what works, and what doesn’t, evaluation can give us insights, help us improve the delivery of our programmes, and help us ensure we are providing value for money. Better evaluation can mean better outcomes for the people of Scotland.

The Scottish Government has a long track record in evaluation. This Action Plan restates the importance of evaluation in delivering evidence informed policy, highlights its links with other core components of effective policy making such as appraisal, and more importantly the actions we will take to deliver this vision.

In addition it sets out steps to improve openness and transparency of outputs from its evaluations via the Scottish Government website and on a new open access online Evaluation Registry portal. I particularly welcome the proposals to establish a new Scottish Government Centre of Expertise in Appraisal and Evaluation, which will take forward the delivery of these actions.

Jamie Hepburn MSP
Minister of Parliamentary Business

August 2024