At its meeting on April 19, the Council of Ministers approved the Preliminary Draft Law on the Institutionalization of Public Policy Assessment in the General Administration of the State, a rule that will serve to strengthen, systematize and give stability and quality to the process of analysis of the various policies implemented by the Central State.
The evaluation of public policies is consolidated as a tool of improvement and learning of government actions, to favor decision-making, propose possible corrections and, ultimately, to hold citizens accountable.
The approval of this standard is one of the milestones of Composer 11 of the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan, related to the strengthening of the public policy evaluation system.
The main elements covered by the new standard are the establishment of a stable evaluation planning mechanism for the entire General State Administration, for which a system of common indicators will be designed. In addition, the ‘ex ante’ evaluation is to be strengthened prior to the approval of public policies, and the results of the evaluations are to be used to improve these policies.
It is also intended to promote an evaluative culture throughout the administration, promoting a change in paradigms by integrating the evaluation of public policies as a tool for improvement, accountability and transparency. In this sense, it is not starting from scratch, as the Independent Tax Liability Authority (AIREF) has extensive experience in the ex-post evaluation of public expenditure review. Therefore, what the government intends with this law is to broaden this approach and to give a transversal character to the evaluation of public policies.
In addition, the new law provides for the creation of a body, the State Public Policy Assessment Agency, to coordinate and monitor the public evaluation system.
With this measure, Spain addresses in a cross-sectional way the evaluation of public policies, in order to analyze and evidence the impact of these policies on issues as decisive for society and the improvement of the welfare state such as gender equality, the environment and the energy transition, depopulation and the demographic challenge, economic growth, redistribution of wealth, adaptation to European regulations and guidelines or the appropriate alignment of the different interventions.