The president of the Independent Authority for Fiscal Responsibility (AIReF), Cristina Herrero, participated today in a conference on Evaluation organised by KPMG, where she highlighted the role played by public policy evaluation at AIReF, which has become a fundamental pillar of the institution.
During her speech, the president reviewed the evolution of AIReF’s evaluation activity over the last years. She highlighted the role of the European boost through the Spending Review commissions and the consolidation of evaluation through the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan (RTRP). Today the institution has a specific Evaluation Division.
She also highlighted the unique features that make the General State Administration (GSA) and the Autonomous Communities turn to AIReF: the strength of an independent and bottom-up institution over all the Public Administrations -which has obvious synergies with fiscal supervision- and evidence-based assessments, focused on effectiveness and efficiency, and with an eminently practical approach, geared towards the formulation of proposals.
Throughout these six years of evaluation at AIReF there have been numerous advances, including the consolidation of evaluation as a permanent function of the institution and the integration of evaluation findings and proposals into decision-making. However, there are also challenges that remain, such as maintaining the quantitative and qualitative relevance of the commissions received in the context of the Spending Reviews, strengthening the monitoring of the evaluation results (currently limited to the Spending Reviews and the evaluations commissioned by the Central Government), improving AIReF’s access to the data and reflecting on the regulatory changes needed to consolidate evaluation.
Finally, and briefly mentioning the recently approved Evaluation Law, the President considered that it is an important step forward as it creates a comprehensive framework for promoting and planning evaluation in the General State Administration. However, there are areas where more work and impetus are needed.
Specifically, she was in favour of providing greater specificity about the evaluation architecture of the General State Administration, guaranteeing the capacity of the evaluator (both in the State and in other regional administrations) and promoting the policy of access to data without limiting it to the General State Administration. Furthermore, the president highlighted the importance of adopting a more structured vision that considers the decentralised reality of public policies, with the participation of the different levels of government in the same policy.