Our priorities for the new government

1. Launch further specialist Individual Placement and Support services for cohorts with the highest barriers to work by 2026.
   
   The Government should expand the remit for Individual Placement and Support (IPS) to new cohorts. IPS is proven to help more people back to work, save public funds, and improve the health and wellbeing of the individuals it helps.
   
   Building on the success of Individual Placement and Support for individuals with severe mental illness, alcohol and drug addiction, and in primary care settings , there is a need to launch this approach to new cohorts, rapidly learn what works for them and then expand access.
   
   Targeted outreach and specialist support co-located within trusted services is needed to help individuals with the most significant barriers to work, such as refugees, children leaving care, people leaving prison, armed forces veterans, people with learning disabilities, and people experiencing homelessness, to find and keep high quality jobs.
   
   
2. Expand access to personalised employment support so that everyone who is out of work receives help to find and maintain a suitable job should they want it, regardless of benefit status.
   
   Everyone who wants to work should have access to tailored support, and access should not be dependent on benefits status. There are over 2.5 million people receiving out of work benefits from the Department for Work and Pensions who have been assessed as having Limited Capability for Work and therefore receive little or no support to find a job.
   
   There are an additional 3.9 million people who are economically inactive (and not in education) who don’t claim any means-tested benefits and receive no support to find work. However, there are many thousands of people within these groups who would like support to move into work. Only 1 in 10 people with a disability receives help to find a job each year.
   
   Support will need to meet people where they are at including: a presence within community spaces, embedding return to work support within GP surgeries, and active outreach. This will tackle economic inactivity, save taxpayer’s money and improve the health and wellbeing of individuals who find work.
   
   
3. Skills and employment funding should be devolved as far as possible to support local growth agendas and help those furthest from work. 
   
   Individuals with the lowest levels of qualifications are currently the least likely to participate in skills training. Skills funding is complex and tied to inputs rather than outcomes giving limited flexibility for local areas to align programmes to local industrial strategies, or target outreach at areas of deprivation and under-capitalised communities.
   
   Decision making around funding for employment and skills should be devolved to the appropriate level of local government to give flexibility to target employment issues, labour market priorities and grow local economies. Central government should set standards, provide innovation funding and facilitate learning networks to ensure that best practice is shared across regions.

1. Invest in inclusive and responsive schools and supporting systems so that support for young people is not only at the point of crisis.
   
   Evidence-based interventions are crucial for supporting our young people. Schools and support systems must identify needs earlier. Investment is needed to understand how to create safe and inclusive systems for young people. Children express their uniqueness and demand services that reflect their diversity. They now interact with society directly, using digital and varied channels. Our current systems, that should be keeping children safe, haven’t kept up.
   
   The government should develop a new policy framework that reduces risk-based decisions and incentivises safety-based policies. This will involve moving away from interventionist and crisis focussed policies towards investment in a safe, inclusive and financially sustainable system
   
   
2. Launch a cross-government Children’s Social Investment Fund to provide long-term, flexible funding to radically improve outcomes for children and young people. 
   
   A government backed Children’s Social Investment Fund can address critical needs and foster long-term positive impact and is building significant support, including from the former Prime Minister, Gordon Brown. Such a fund, supported by philanthropy and corporate contributions, requires substantial financial and structural involvement from central government.
   
   Well-structured outcomes funding can attract socially-motivated investors, although the market may need 1–3 years to adapt. The fund should prioritise prevention as well as balancing child and system-level outcomes to avoid siloed programmes. It should have a minimum duration of 7 years with multi-year budgeting and capacity building funding alongside the investment, so as to support local market development which meets the needs of communities.
   
   Additionally, it should employ shared data standards and support children and young people during key life transitions, such as starting secondary school, leaving education and even getting their first smartphone
   
   
3. Commit to creating the data sharing infrastructure necessary to allow the safe and secure collection, storage and analysis of children’s data — ensuring that vulnerable children are always seen and supported.
   
   The government should commit to creating a better data-sharing infrastructure for children to overcome both technical and integration challenges that impede the effective use of data. Establishing a common child identifier is only the beginning; it is crucial to also focus on surfacing valuable use cases, enhancing data literacy among practitioners, building consensus on data usage, and coordinating data teams for quality assurance and sharing.
   
   Effective governance structures must oversee data use beyond the initial sharing. Investing in identifying and codifying best practices across the country, and funding the associated technical and people costs, will ensure a robust infrastructure that can significantly improve outcomes for children and young people

1. Support the growth of locally driven outcomes-based partnerships to drive social investment into communities so that health and care are locally led, community ‑powered, holistic and coordinated.
   
   National and local health charities and foundations struggle to meet rising demand. At the same time, funding for services to address demand is often non-recurrent, driven from the centre of government and based on organisational silos.
   
   It doesn’t allow enough time to test and learn and creates a ​‘hand to mouth’ economy for voluntary sector organisations. We know that sticking plaster policies to tackle systemic social problems do not work. By centralising transformation and crisis response in statutory bodies, we’ve disempowered communities from managing their own health, resulting in late intervention.
   
   The next government needs to move away from a centralisation mindset to enable local partnerships to determine appropriate approaches to health and care without sudden funding cut-offs.
   
   
2. Leverage existing grants, assets and investments to unlock sustainable, recyclable funding and expert capacity to enable health and social care partnerships with the voluntary sector.
   
   Social Finance and Macmillan are pioneering Community Transformation Funds: a new grant-making and social investment approach, providing sustainable transformation funding that doesn’t require a commercial return on investment. The funds will channel investment from impact-focused funders into local outcome partnerships.
   
   This sustainable funding model recycles outcome payments from statutory bodies back into the fund, ensuring long-term impact. Social Finance has a track record of raising multi-year social investment to support innovative health improvement ideas, providing practical support and ensuring the delivery of measurable outcomes, with the NHS agreeing to fund demonstrated successes.
   
   The government should remove barriers to social investment including the never-ending cycle of short-term pilots. Social investment is an exceptionally capital efficient way for funders to deliver impact and focus on prevention, with leverage of nearly £1 to £5 in some cases.
   
   
3. Accelerate partnerships and learning through community-led approaches to tackle health inequalities to drive better informed policy.
   
   Learning from innovative, community-led approaches to addressing health inequalities should be the first step for a new government.
   
   There are many great ideas that improve health and create efficiencies, but it is disincentivising when initiatives are siloed within funding systems, and only deemed successful if they’re cash-saving. Yet innovative partnerships are emerging across health and care services including in maternity, end-of-life care, and services supporting older people with multiple needs.
   
   It is time to break the cycle of over reliance on public sector services to solve all health challenges. Government can enable more community-led approaches to tackling health inequalities if it encourages the value of learning and acting together and values the experience that comes from outside of government and public bodies.

We need to generate economic growth in ways that remedy our most pressing and complex societal issues. To achieve this, there must be more private as well as public investment, both of which are chronically low as a share of UK GDP (against both historical and international comparisons). 

Since we pioneered the first social impact bond (SIB) in 2010, successfully reducing rates of reoffending in Peterborough, SIBs have been launched worldwide supporting better outcomes for people and addressing complex challenges. By focusing on outcomes rather than rigid activity specifications, this model empowers frontline experts to tailor delivery to individual and local circumstances, dramatically improving the likelihood of delivering improved outcomes. 

Social investment can be a powerful partner to the voluntary, community, faith and social enterprise sector (VCFSE) providing capital and taking the risk of achieving outcomes and facilitating partners to focus on the delivery of outcomes, encouraging a learning approach, and reducing competition between VCFSEs by giving them clarity on longer-term funding. 

A recent independent report has found that social outcomes contracts – public service delivery focused on empowering local charities to tackle entrenched social issues – have generated nearly £9 of public value for every £1 spent, saving the taxpayer £507m.

Blended finance structures, designed and built at community and city/​region levels are a proven means of aggregating and leveraging capital provision from grantmakers to lenders around common outcomes goals, providing a source of funding at scale and building knowledge and expertise around how best to tackle the most pressing social issues locally. We want to see the government increase blended finance structures to address complex challenges. 

For example, in health and social care, Social Finance and Macmillan are pioneering Community Transformation Funds: a new grant-making and social investment approach, providing sustainable transformation funding that doesn’t require a commercial return on investment. The funds will channel investment from national funders into local outcome partnerships. This sustainable funding model recycles outcome payments from statutory bodies back into the fund, ensuring long-term impact for the communities that they serve.