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Introduction

Alternative download: A complete copy of the document is also available in pdf format:

Trying It Out - The Role of 'Pilots' in Policy-Making Report of a Review of Government Pilots (PDF)

An important innovation in recent years has been the phased introduction of major government policies or programmes, allowing them to be tested, evaluated and adjusted where necessary, before being rolled out nationally. This practice has been widespread in the USA for much longer, partly because its federal structure enables individual states to mount their own fairly large-scale experimental pilots to test the likely impact of a proposed new policy or delivery mechanism or both (Greenberg and Shroder, 1997). The impact of such pilots in the US has been mixed – sometimes helping to ‘prove’ certain policies, sometimes leading to adjustments of either policy or process, and sometimes to their abandonment. The sharp growth in the number and scale of British pilots since 1997 (Walker, 2001; Sanderson, 2002) led to a call in the wide-ranging report on modernising government, Adding It Up (Performance and Innovation Unit, 2000) for their methods and fitness for purpose to be evaluated. The report recommended 'more and better use of pilots to test the impacts of policies before national roll-out'. To help achieve this aim, it also recommended the creation of a panel of enquiry to oversee an exchange of experiences between departments across UK administrations and to consider the future role of pilots.

The Government Chief Social Researcher’s Office (GCSRO) in the Strategy Unit was given responsibility for setting up this panel (see membership below), which began its work in September 2001. It met three times and initiated the following set of activities, the output from which forms the basis of this report:

• a workshop of experts in the field of social policy evaluation and piloting to help develop and shape the framework for, and scope of, the review;
• a literature review charting the experience of successful (and unsuccessful) policy pilots both in the UK and abroad, and summarising key academic and professional debates about their role;
• a self-completion questionnaire sent to the heads of research in key government departments across UK administrations to help map the scale and types of pilots that had been carried out in the UK over the last five years and their perceived impact;
• face-to-face interviews with senior civil servants – in both research and policy roles – to explore their experience of piloting of different kinds;
• face-to-face interviews with selected Ministers to discover their own perspective on recent pilots within their ministries and case studies from government departments across UK administrations to illustrate a range of approaches to piloting.

Review Panel*	Review Team*
Professor Roger Jowell, Chair	Phil Davies
Professor Waqar Ahmad	Annette King
Sue Duncan	Rebecca Stanley
Professor John Fox	Tess Ridge
Professor Edward Page	Lucy Woodward
Michael Richardson
Judy Sebba
Ann Taggart
Professor Robert Walker
Professor Paul Wiles

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Footnotes:

• *See Annex 2 for affiliations and further details of the work undertaken.[back to text]

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Crown copyright © 2003; Published December 2003.