SROI and Public Policy

nef's work on Social Return on Investment and public policy examines how decision-making can be informed by practices of measurement and valuation that are better able to capture what matters most to people, communities, the environment, and society. nef has piloted the use of the methodology to determine more comprehensively the costs and benefits of government decisions in three areas:

• criminal justice
• economic development
• children in care.

The programme found that making visible and valuing hidden costs and benefits leads to more informed policy-making. For instance, valuing the improved well-being of children in care - rather than focusing on the unit cost of delivering that care - could ensure more appropriate placement decisions are made. In addition, allowing non-violent women offenders to complete community sentences rather than go to prison creates significant social value through improved outcomes for the woman, her children and society. Finally we learned that traditional measures of successful regeneration programmes - numbers of jobs, or enterprises created and people trained - were not only misguided but potentially perverse. The real value from spending in deprived areas was the extent to which people furthest from the labour market were able to take up meaningful and sustainable employment. Achieving this goal would mean approaching regeneration policy in a very different way.

Based on this research nef offers a set of principles and techniques for policy-makers in how to more effectively measure what matters.