No core-funding backstop for evidence infrastructure (What Works Centres)
The What Works Centre for Wellbeing closed in April 2024 when its grants ended (despite shaping the Treasury Green Book and national wellbeing frameworks) because, as NPC noted, a cross-cutting remit means 'everyone's responsibility and no-one's': no single department owns it. Other centres survive on short departmental grants renewed at political discretion. No endowment or statutory core-funding mechanism underpins the evidence bodies government itself cites.
Evidence intermediaries are textbook public goods: every department benefits, none will pay. Letting them die one by one destroys accumulated methodological capital and makes 'what works' government rhetoric hollow precisely as fiscal pressure raises the value of knowing what to cut.
A pooled ten-year core-funding facility for cross-departmental evidence bodies, administered via the Cabinet Office Evaluation Task Force or an endowed independent 'Evidence Foundation', with mixed government and foundation capital and explicit continuity rules.
// Build together: Counterparty: Cabinet Office Evaluation Task Force plus foundations co-capitalising a ten-year facility; no legislation, but needs government at the table.
Cross-cutting evidence bodies government itself cites are dying one by one because no department owns them, and the fix is a pooled facility that is ready but not yet anyone's job.
One gap, several dossiers: entries folded into this one (1)
The research pass surfaced this gap independently in more than one domain. Those entries are merged here so the map counts it once: the same ten-year core-funding instrument for What Works evidence infrastructure, seen from the funding and policy lenses.
№ 163 · Evaluation is discretionary and What Works infrastructure sits on funding cliffs (Policy (lens))
The NAO concluded government 'cannot have confidence its spending in many policy areas is making a difference'; the Evaluation Task Force has improved major-project coverage (April 2025 GMPP review) but evaluation remains variable and unpublished elsewhere, with no duty to evaluate or publish. The What Works Network's funding is a patchwork of ESRC, Dormant Assets and Lottery money: What Works Wellbeing closed on 30 April 2024 when funding ended; the children-and-families function is being re-competed for April 2027; a new What Works Centre for local employment support must start by January 2027. Centres are commissioned and dropped piecemeal rather than sustained as national evidence infrastructure.
Its fill: A statutory or Treasury-directed duty to evaluate and publish for programmes above a spend threshold, plus ten-year core funding (endowment-style, via ETF/ESRC/Dormant Assets) for the What Works Network so centres are sustained as infrastructure rather than re-tendered as projects. Committee interest: Public Accounts Committee, PACAC.