Report: ‘No clear evidence’ social impact bonds lead to better outcomes
Monday, July 23, 2018
By Liam Kay
There is “no clear evidence” that social impact bonds lead to better outcomes for beneficiaries or that they are more cost-effective than other approaches to commissioning public services, a government-funded evaluation has concluded.
The exercise, which was carried out by the Policy Innovation Research Unit at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and the research organisation Rand Europe with funding from the NIHR Policy Research Programme at the Department of Health and Social Care, says its findings show that SIBs are “no panacea for public service reform”.
Policymakers should therefore focus on the parts of SIBs that offer the most promise for developing outcome-based contracting, the evaluation says, without suggesting that SIBs are the only way of achieving this.
Photo courtesy of Sudipto Sarkar.
