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1. What is an ERDF assessment?

All ERDF grant funded recipients have a requirement to produce a Summative Assessment Report. The idea of an ERDF Summative Assessment is to evaluate performance and delivery, showcase lessons and think about the future. A good assessment provides impartial insights into project performance. The rationale for it is to enhance project implementation, and provide reliable evidence of efficiency, effectiveness and value for money, as well as insights into what and why interventions work (or not), and key lessons learned. The analysis conducted as part of a Summative Assessment can be particularly valuable in making the case for future funding. 

How Kada does it: One of the main purposes of an ERDF Summative Assessment is to prove to your funders that your project has had tangible benefits.  It is worth using the assessment to identify for your own benefit what did and did not go well with your project, and what changes you could make in the future.  You can see examples of our ERDF assessment work in our case studies.

2. What needs to go into an ERDF assessment?

Put simply, the ERDF Summative Assessment guidance asks evaluators to review the relevance and consistency of a project and consider its progress, delivery and management. There are also some detailed ERDF requirements in terms of assessing impacts and value for money that require a degree of understanding of economic impact methods such as those highlighted with HMT’s Green Book. 

The ERDF Summative Assessment (SA) guidance (ESIF-GN-1-033 Version 4 Date published 1 July 2020) is designed to ensure consistency across the English programme, and places emphasis on implementation and understanding the difference a project has made. You may already be applying many of its principles. 

In summary, an ERDF Summative Assessment needs to: 

• provide an accurate assessment of contractual performance. As project impacts often take time to come to fruition, it is essential it captures ‘anticipated’ and wider effects. 

• set the scene well. Projects need to be set in the context of your local priorities and the local industrial and English and EU programme context.  
• ensure relevance and consistency in light of any changes in policy or economic circumstances during delivery – for instance considering the effects of Brexit and, more recently, Covid-19. 
• reflect on delivery and management, and the procurement arrangements and partners’ experience.  

Mostly importantly, the impacts of your programme must be evidenced with robust data.  

How Kada does it: We use a mix of qualitative and quantitative research techniques including desk research, performance analysis, case studies, stakeholder and beneficiary interviews, and impact assessment techniques. This helps us ‘triangulate’ the findings, increasing robustness and reliability.   

 3. How can I evidence my project’s impact?

The guidance highlights several principles to follow, including beneficiary engagement – taking into account the experiences and comments of anyone who has benefited from the project. To this end we suggest discussions or interviews with all willing beneficiaries to include a pragmatic and useful counterfactual perspective. 

It is important to take an independent and consistent approach in order to ensure that you can draw reliable conclusions from your data. There is some flexibility here, but all ERDF projects follow similar approaches: the use of logic models, speaking to stakeholders and beneficiaries, using widely recognised impact assessment techniques etc. This ensures that the reports are of sufficiently high quality and consistency. It is important to be clear in your report about the approach taken and any assumptions made when assessing impacts.  

How Kada does it: To ensure that our ERDF Summative Assessments meet the requirements of the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG), we have designed our own impact models specifically tailored to the ESIF 0-014 form. Our approach ensures that all calculations are evidenced and defendable using primary research with direct and indirect beneficiaries and credible benchmarks. We assess cost effectiveness and value for money using a combination of our own in-house intelligence, design bespoke impact models and ensure these are benchmarked against ERDF guidance (which we are familiar with) and our own previous work. 

4. What about Brexit – will reports still be useful for clients looking to develop the next iteration of their programme? 

Absolutely! Details of the Shared Prosperity Fund are expected in 2021. Those applicants with robust ERDF Summative Assessments will be well placed to submit evidence–based bids for this new funding. Summative Assessments provide an impartial review of delivery capabilities, giving future funders strong evidence that you have the right credentials for project implementation.  

Signs are that the Shared Prosperity Fund will mirror many of the priorities in the previous ERDF programme combined with current UK priorities. The big themes for future funders are likely to include impactful low carbon measures, post-Covid 19 resilience and post-Brexit opportunities. Enterprise and innovation programmes are likely to remain important.   

Karl: What have you learned from conducting many ERDF summative assessments? 

I have been working on ERDF since the 1990’s. For me, the best ERDF Summative Assessments exceed the Government’s minimum standards. We try to speak to all those involved in delivery as well as external partners. We also consult with as many beneficiaries as possible. This ensures that what we are saying is grounded in reality. I have learnt to bring in experts if needed and set up ERDF ‘systems and processes’ to make life easier for the team. We have banks of questions, case study templates from our designer and many impact models and internal value for money benchmarks. A lot of our time goes into presentation including infographics, charts and tables, and we make sure we have powerful quotations to illustrate the key findings.  We are not judgemental either. Where programmes are not performing, we look at the reasons why and thinking about the learning points and how challenges might be overcome. This year we have had exceptional mitigating circumstances and unprecedented economic shocks. It has not been an easy time to be an ERDF project manager and our team applies empathy and understanding in assessing performance.  

What does Kada offer?

Well, we are a nice team to work with and listen to what clients want and need. We provide high quality, independent, incisive, challenging, evidence–based reports and recommendations. Our team pays close attention to detail. We make our clients’ decision making easy, and routinely exceed their expectations. We also help clients with the paperwork. As part of the process the Government requires project beneficiaries to fill in an ERDF Summative Assessment Report Summary (ESIF-Form-1-014) in Excel. On appearance this looks simple enough but there is a lot of detail and these can take 2 days to fill in well. We do this for our clients at no charge. Our impact and output spreadsheets are set up to drop the findings into the forms. We have evaluated programmes covering innovation, low carbon, enterprise, international trade, start-up, enterprise growth, HE collaboration, sectoral support and many more, covering the full spectrum of ERDF eligible activity. We are able to draw on this extensive experience.  

What have clients most liked about ERDF Summative Assessments conducted by Kada?

We ask our clients this. They have commented on our professionalism, approachability and flexibility and the fact we offer full compliance with the ERDF Summative Assessment Guidance. They like our insights on programme performance from different perspectives and have used our recommendations for follow on projects. Clients tell us we are responsive, friendly and easy to work with, providing high quality reports. It gives me comfort that clients return to us after they have worked with us once.  

Summing up: What will a client get from an ERDF summative assessment?

An ERDF Summative Assessment allows our clients to:  

(a) confidently assert the true costs, savings, and economic and wider impacts and demonstrate the value of their ERDF project to funders and stakeholders, and  

(b) critically assess their ERDF projects and programmes, improve their effectiveness, and/or inform future programming decisions. 

What next? 

If you want to find out more about ERDF Summative Assessments and how we can help you, get in touch with Karl at karl.dalgleish@kadaresearch.co.uk for an initial free consultation about what it involves. 

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“I am really pleased Kada was able to make a donation of £1,000 towards the new oven at the Archer Project as part of our CSR activities which we take seriously. It is such a vital piece of equipment and after many months of fund–raising I am so pleased to see we have met our target and had the oven installed. It was a pleasure to serve the first breakfasts to Sheffield’s homeless people this morning with the Cathedral Archer Project team.” Karl Dalgleish, Director of Kada Research 

The new oven will provide over 400,000 meals for vulnerable and homeless people in Sheffield.

Sheffield based Kada has a long-standing relationship with the Cathedral Archer Project, which provides support and care for local homeless and vulnerable people. A hugely important part of this support is the provision of fresh, hot food, which is vital for people’s physical and mental health. COVID-19 has presented a particular challenge to everyone, but to vulnerable people in particular – during the first lockdown, the project was providing almost 200 meals every day.  

However, the old combination oven used to prepare those meals has been failing. Having had it fixed several times in the space of a few months, it became clear that a new one was going to be needed in order to keep providing vital meals during lockdown. Good commercial ovens are expensive and the team have struggled to raise the funds required. Kada was pleased to be able to donate £1,000 toward the £7,000 cost of a new oven. It is now finally installed and ready to go just in time for both a cold winter and the 30th anniversary of the Cathedral Project. Karl was glad to join the team to help serve the first few breakfasts from the newly installed oven. 

The oven won’t just be providing food to vulnerable people. The team at the Cathedral Archer Project have been working hard to develop social enterprises in order to provide people with work experience and connections to local business. Have successfully built up a cleaning and printing enterprise, they have now been trialling a small cake bakery to supply cakes to local businesses. The new oven will put them in a much better position to build that trial up into a full social enterprise to benefit homeless and vulnerable people. 

With an expected lifetime of 12 years, the oven should provide in excess of 200,000 hot cooked breakfasts and the same number of lunches to the most vulnerable people in Sheffield. Having good-quality equipment puts the Cathedral Archer Project in a strong place to be resilient in unforeseen circumstances, such as the global pandemic we are currently facing.   

“I love our new oven. It will be used 6 days a week and is so versatile, just what we need feeding the numbers we do. During the pandemic lockdown we were providing nearly 200 meals every day and an oven like this just makes catering so much easier.” Tim Renshaw, Chief Executive of the Cathedral Archer Project

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Kada Research headlines from newly published coronavirus business support statistics 

Background

The House of Commons Library this week released statistics on the uptake of government coronavirus business support, detailing the distribution of support funds by local area [1]. Our graduate intern Anne-Marie has taken a look at the statistics to give some initial impressions of to what extent Sheffield made the most use of coronavirus business support relative to the rest of the UK.

The available support consisted of employment schemes, such as the furlough and self-employed support schemes, several types of business loans, the COVID corporate financing facility, business rates relief and VAT deferrals. This short blog post focuses on employment schemes and business loans.

Employment Schemes  

1 in 3 of the population at some point furloughed

By midnight 16th August 2020, 1.2 million employers had furloughed 9.6 million jobs over the course of the pandemic. On average, 32% of workers across the UK have at some point in the pandemic been furloughed, with the highest rate in the West Midlands at 34%. Within industries, the food and accommodation sector had the highest furlough rate at 77%, whilst the wholesale and retail industry furloughed the highest number of jobs at 1.9 million. The number of furloughs at a given time peaked on the 8th of May 2020 at 8.9 million.

The levels of self-employment income support were also high. In the first round up to 19 July, 2.7 million claims were made totalling £7.8 billion. In the second round from the 17 August, 296,850 claims up to the 17 August totalled £768.9 million. According to the government report, by the 31 July, 77% of the eligible population claimed self-employment income support, with the highest number of these coming from the construction industry [2].

In Sheffield, a total of 74,300 jobs were furloughed and 19,700 self-employment support claims were made representing some 37% of the workforce

Data for Sheffield includes Sheffield Central, South East, Brightside and Hillsborough, Heeley and Penistone and Stocksbridge. Furlough uptake rates in Sheffield varied between 23% in Sheffield Hallam and 32% in Sheffield South East. This puts most areas of Sheffield below the UK average of 32% furlough rate. The self-employment claims in Sheffield totalled £53.2 million, with uptake rates ranging between 75% and 83%. This is at or slightly above the UK average of 77%, possibly because construction, the industry with the highest number of self-employment support claims across the UK, is the third-largest industry in Sheffield. In total, during the pandemic 37% of Sheffield’s workforce have either been furloughed or have received self-employment support.

Business Support  

The Government offered four primary financial loan schemes for businesses impacted by COVID-19. The Bounce Back Loan Scheme, backed 100% by the Government, offers all businesses loans of up to £50,000 or 25% of turnover. The Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme (CBILS), backed 80% by the Government, offers loans of up to £5 million for businesses with a turnover under £45 million. The Coronavirus Larger Business Interruption Loan Scheme (CLBILS) offers loans to larger businesses. The Future Fund provides loans to businesses that rely on equity investment and are pre-profit, and therefore cannot access the other business support schemes.

In total, over 1 million businesses have accessed loans worth over £53 billion (approval rates were high)

Of the applications to the CBILS scheme, 49% were approved, with 60,409 loans totalling £13.68 billion. For the CLBILS scheme, 55% of loans were approved, with 516 loans totalling £3.5 billion. The Bounce Back scheme had an approval rate of 82%, with 1,174,854 loans totalling £35,47 billion. Finally, the Future Fund approved 65% of claims, funding 590 claims totalling £590,000. The regional spread of the loans was relatively proportionate to the population. [3]

In Sheffield, 7,327 businesses accessed loan support worth £311.2 million

For Sheffield, only data on the CBILS and Bounce Back schemes are available. On the CBILS scheme, 378 businesses claimed £87.9 million in loan support. The Bounce Back loan scheme saw 6,949 loans totalling £223.3 million – these loans covered some 46% of the total business base. [4] The majority of business loans were given in Sheffield Central, Sheffield South East and Penistone and Stocksbridge.

Want to understand take up in your local economy better? Need help in developing some clear actions to support business recovery? Speak to Karl Dalgleish (karl.dalgleish@kadaresearch.co.uk).

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