Short Abstract

WYCA’s new Outcomes Framework embeds evaluation into strategy, translating complex evidence into actionable insights that can guide regional investment and strengthen feedback loops. This work has solidified a focus on outcomes and will help promote a culture of evidence-based decision-making.

Description

The West Yorkshire Combined Authority (WYCA) is a Mayoral Strategic Authority with responsibilities across transport, culture, skills, housing, and economic development. In recent years, our Evaluation Team has worked to embed robust monitoring and evaluation practices across an organisation undergoing rapid change and under pressure to deliver at pace. We have had to balance the urgency of tackling entrenched inequalities with the need for evidence-based decision-making and learning from past interventions.

As our ambitions expand—particularly in areas such as mass transit, bus franchising, and home retrofit—while funding remains constrained, the need to prioritise investment around strategic outcomes has become increasingly important. Equally, to support learning and accountability, we must distil complex evaluation evidence from a multibillion-pound investment portfolio into clear, actionable insights for senior leaders and elected members.

In response, throughout 2025, the Evaluation Team has led the development of an overarching Outcomes Framework. Grounded in WYCA’s Local Growth Plan and other strategies such as the Local Transport Plan, the framework identifies key outputs and outcomes across policy areas, supported by both intervention-level and regional metrics. This enables us to track progress at a regional level while assessing the contribution of individual programmes.

The framework is summarised in a series of one-page logic models. Whilst these are deceptively simple, we developed them through extensive stakeholder engagement, negotiation of competing priorities, and alignment with national devolution targets.

We showcase the development of an outcomes framework as a practical strategy for generating and disseminating evaluation evidence in ways that meaningfully inform strategic decision-making by gaining buy-in from organisational leadership up front. By using theory of change models, evaluation practitioners can provide strategic clarity and lead conversations around organisational outcomes and objectives. As the outcomes framework becomes established, this will help embed robust and proportionate approaches to evaluation within a complex, multi-stakeholder public sector organisation. This case study serves to highlight the critical role of sustained communication and relationship-building with a range of stakeholders in ensuring that evaluation has real real-world impact and can inform better policy-making and delivery.

We will sshare our approach to developing this framework through iterative stakeholder engagement and explore its implications for improving evaluation design, evidence use, and strategic learning. We argue that a shared set of outcomes and metrics can strengthen the ROAMEF cycle, support continuous improvement, and embed evaluation more deeply into regional strategy and decision-making, offering applicable insights for attendees working across diverse evaluation contexts.