Policy analytics and accountability mechanisms: judging the ‘value for money’ of policy implementation

Abstract

Many applications of analytical methods in public policy relate to aspects of ex ante decision support, such as assisting policy makers assess projected costs and benefits of potential approaches to implementing policy objectives. This paper sets out some issues in a less widely discussed area of policy analytics, namely their application to holding government bodies to account, ex post, for the ‘value for money’ with which they have used public funds. It shows how the task of arriving at a judgment on value for money can be modelled as the construction of a partial order relation on an ‘outcome space’ of possible outcomes with ‘value’ and ‘money’ dimensions, and uses this framework to present case examples from the work of the UK National Audit Office. It shows how analytical methods are used to provide evidence to support such judgments. It concludes that there is scope for exploring the application of new techniques, such as big data analytics, to developing the ‘observed’ and ‘possible’ elements of value-for-money conclusions. There is also scope for applying decision-analytic techniques, such as multi-criteria decision analysis, to develop the ‘value-for-money criteria’ against which actual performance can be judged in fair, balanced, transparent, consistent, and technically rigorous manner.