Housing Support, Prevention of Homelessness and Social Return

As resources get tight we will increasingly be tasked with evidencing the worth of our work by using valid measures. The price of support may be an indication of value but does it give us the full picture, what of the wider benefit? Over recent years evidencing social benefit has assumed more importance as a factor in determining whether a service is funded or not.

An accepted means of measuring ‘social value’ is through calculating the Social Return On Investment (SROI). SROI borrows from economics and accountancy, was developed from both social accounting and cost-benefit analysis to measure social value by means that are relevant to organisations and stakeholders including commissioning bodies. The return is expressed in terms of a ratio; such as for every £1 invested in Housing Support the XYZ Trust can evidence £5 benefit. The underpinning principles are about involving stakeholders, trying to understand what has changed as a result of interventions and being transparent and honest throughout. The process is as much about learning; what you are doing, how you can make best use of your efforts and understanding your limitations, as it is about gaining a valid and qualified measure of the wider social benefit accruing from your efforts.

Early into the process (2008-09), we acknowledged that isolating and calculating the benefit of housing support alone was difficult due to trying to disentangle the work done by other parts of the organisation. Perhaps this wasn’t the best way to proceed, could an alignment to the key strategic aims work better? At the time these were: Preventing homelessness, Sustainable Living and Temporary Accommodation. This tact was given added significance given the commitment by all to prevention of homelessness in the light of the experiences from England’s ‘trailblazers’ Enhanced Housing Options approach over the past few years. Housing Support is about prevention of homelessness, many of the referrals for support were a last resort before instructing proceedings to evict. A positive consequence was that no person receiving housing support has been evicted, we had an early measure.

There are two types of SROI report; an evaluative and a forecast report. Given that Frontline Fife had embraced IT solutions and have been recording interventions and outcomes electronically on our ‘Pathways’ system for some time, (revised to incorporate the Outcomes Matrix), the Consultant, Sheila Durie from Haldane Associates, advised that it may be more relevant to proceed with a forecast report rather than an evaluative report. The forecast report enables a ratio to be set which can be revised and comparisons made with in subsequent years – all things being equal. An Evaluative report is a lot more involved in terms setting up and articulating interventions, outcomes and change. There is also a lot more emphasis on writing this up as an evaluation document. Both approaches are about learning; at Frontline this enabled us to grapple with essential aspects such as, what is an outcome? We weren’t entirely happy with having to record against around 100 outcomes! – we’ve since ‘slimmed’ these down to 11 and managed to disentangle the input, output, interventions, outcomes, impact maze!

In short the following ratios resulted:

Prevention of Homelessness:

  • Ratio: £6.96 : £1 (7:1)

Sustainable Living:

  • Ratio: £4.20 : £1 (4:1)

Temporary Accommodation:

  • Ratio: £3.97 : £1 (4:1)

Due to the ‘proximity’ of Prevention and sustainable living we calculated a composite ratio for these which encapsulated all housing support effort:

  • Ratio: £6.13 : £1 (6:1)

Any accredited SROI practitioner will be at pains to caution against making comparisons between efforts solely on such ratios, they are particular to widely differing circumstances and variables even within similar areas of operation.

The prevention ratio is ‘buoyed’ at Frontline due to the Housing Advice and court representation service which we operate in partnership with Fife council and out of the Home4Good network across the county.

Frontline is commissioned by Fife council to offer Housing Support, advice and housing management Fife-wide. We need to be able to demonstrate the social benefit and the future cost of not commissioning a service. Increasingly, funding bodies will be looking to employ arrangements such as Social Impact Bonds – payment on anticipated impact. With our experience of SROI, combined with our commitment to electronic measurement systems and web-based solutions demonstrating continuous improvement for regulatory bodies, we’re hopeful that we are better placed to adapt and work to any outcome or result based approach.