The Cabinet Office has just today announced that as part of the Prime Minister’s life chances strategy a new £80m Life Chances Fund has been opened and will continue for the next nine years.
The fund is described as a “top-up fund” for locally developed Social Impact Bond (SIB) projects. The aims of the fund are to:
- Increase the number and scale of SIBs in England.
- Make it easier and quicker to set up a SIB.
- Generate public sector efficiencies by delivering better outcomes and using this to understand how cashable savings are.
- Increase social innovation and build a clear evidence-base of what works.
- Increase the amount of capital available to a wider range of VCOs and social enterprise and enable them to compete for public sector contracts.
- Provide better evidence of the effectiveness of the SIB mechanism and the savings that are being accrued; and
- Grow the scale of the social investment market.
The fund will operate through thematic “call-outs”, the first two being drug and alcohol dependency; and children’s services.
→ You can read more about the fund and its operation and purpose here.
