This report looks at whether it is possible to develop a rapid assessment tool to rate government departments on their use of evidence in policy decisions. The idea was to be able to compare and rank departments – to show which used evidence well and which less well, and in doing so highlight and celebrate good practice while incentivising others to match the standards of the best.

This report:

1. Sets out in detail our attempts to develop a framework for assessing departments’ use of evidence – and why such an apparently easy task proved to be so difficult to put into practice.

2. Explains the approach we ended up testing, namely a focus on evidence transparency as a first step to assessing the quality of evidence.

3. Sets out the framework that emerged from that testing.

4. Makes recommendations for how those responsible both for policy making and for holding policymakers to account should respond to the framework and the issues raised, as well as setting out how we plan to use the framework in benchmarking government performance over the coming year.