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Payment by results: ‘soft outcomes’ and the needs of funders

The second in a series of blogs from Nick O'Shea

On Friday, Tamsyn Roberts and I met went to see the 999 Club, a centre on Deptford Broadway which is open to everyone, offering comfort, respite, advice and guidance to the most isolated, excluded and lonely people in society. We will be working with them over the next few months as part of the Connecting Policy with Practice programme.

One of the themes that emerged during our first workshop at the IfG was the tension between ‘soft outcomes’ and the needs of funders. While colleagues from the Civil Service can appreciate the needs of service users are hard to measure, they do need the reassurance that they are spending public money appropriately. This reassurance is important as more and more government services are contracted out and ‘payment by results’ becomes an increasingly popular funding model.

The 999 Club is one of the voluntary sector organisations working with us in Lewisham, Southwark and Lambeth as we develop business plans for Big Lottery funding to support people with multiple needs. It has been in operation for 20 years and is financed by a mixture of charitable funding, individual donations and grants from the Lady Florence Trust. I grew up a couple of hundred metres away from the branch in Downham and know it has been a continuing source of support and fellowship for many – particularly the elderly.

Tamsyn and I want to explore whether we can demonstrate that a service like the 999 Club can save the public purse money, and provide a business case for their support that we can feed back to government and to funders. Specifically, we want to work out whether we can identify and quantify the cost savings the club generates to local agencies, including health, the council and police.

Their welcome was warm, and was wonderfully extended to us. We walked straight in and were met with a ‘hello’ and a cup of tea. We met with Chief Executive Peter Wood, who is an inspiration. I know it is a cliché to say that, but he really is. Having worked all around the world for banks and government, he took up the helm as CEO of the 999 Club in January. He talked us through the many services – including a nursery, advocacy service and winter night shelter – and gave us a tour of the extensive building. (I pointed out, unhelpfully, that it would make great luxury flats….)

Tamsyn and I focused on their funding model and its ability to sustain the organisation. They have very close relationships with charitable funders who not only offer finance, but practical support and help too. For us, there was a clear link to the impact the centre has on statutory services. For example, the centre works closely with the brilliant Three-Boroughs Homeless team (Guys and St Thomas) to ensure that its members have access to nurses. However, Accident and Emergency (£129 a time) is used by many members who cannot access a GP. We talked about the clear cost savings that would result from a GP link worker, who can help members use conventional surgeries, rather than Lewisham Accident and Emergency.

However, with an open-access centre that rightly offers a welcome rather than a 28-page assessment form, it is difficult to track the outcomes of the members and measure the quantitative impact of the club needed to make the case. Getting that information in the least intrusive, most robust way possible, is what Tamsyn and I signed up for.

Over the course of this year, pairs involved in the IfG-BIG programme are doing research on the ground, and I keep saying that I want ours to be the best of these projects – even though this is not a competition. But there is a clear goal here. We have a service which is well run and doing objectively good things for a deprived community. However, there is no way of measuring the impact that this is having. Tamsyn is a specialist in social investment with a career in the voluntary sector; I am an economist with experience of the local community. Our experience will help us draw out lessons for both charities and funders on how to demonstrate impact in a meaningful way. It also feels like a great combination to get involved in a charity which is deeply rooted in supporting local people, and would benefit from a quick shot of quantitative evaluation.

As we walked back to the train station, plans began to form. We are going to think about evaluation frameworks which would work for their membership and enable us to put an economic case to local commissioners for considering how they could support the club. I said goodbye to Tamsyn at the station and TO MY SHAME went and ate 2 doughnuts. It was Friday and raining – sometimes you need a bit of refined sugar to face the 47 bus home.

More in a fortnight.

Keywords
Public sector
Publisher
Institute for Government

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