NI Practical Guide to the Green Book

• Introduction
• The Basic Steps of an Economic Appraisal
• What is Economic Appraisal and When is it required?
• Step by Step Appraisal Guidance
• Policy and Programme Appraisal
• Appraising Assistance to the Private, Voluntary and Community Sectors
• PPP Projects and Procurement Issues
• Appraising Information Technology Projects
• Appraisal of Accommodation Projects
• Business Cases
• Approval of Departmental Expenditure
• Implementation, Management and Monitoring
• Evaluation
• Expert Advice, Use of Consultants and Training
• Terminology and Abbreviations
• Appendices

Preface

1. This guide is to help officials and managers in the Northern Ireland Civil Service evaluate expenditure policies and programmes.


2. As part of the continuing drive to target public resources more effectively and to improve the efficiency of Government, more emphasis than ever is being put on ensuring that policies are achieving what they were originally intended to achieve.


3. This guide closely follows and develops existing HM Treasury guidance on policy evaluation. It describes in more detail the main principles of evaluation and elaborates on evaluation design and the construction of the base case. It provides technical guidance to specialist and non specialist readers in central government and its agencies.


4. It sets out core conventions that will be common to the majority of applications and while the emphasis is on evaluation of quantitative outputs of programmes and Value For Money (VFM) assessment, the principles are equally relevant to the evaluation of the qualitative outputs of programmes.


5. The guide describes what evaluation is about, then goes on to outline briefly a possible set of steps or process for performing an evaluation. Details on conceptual and analytical issues are provided in a technical supplement.


6. Further advice on technical matters should be available from departmental economists, statisticians, social researchers and policy analysts.


7. Suggestions for improvement on the content or presentation of this guide are welcome. These should be addressed to Economics Division, Department of Finance and Personnel, Room 335, Parliament Buildings, Stormont, Belfast BT4 3SW.