The Government Outcomes Lab (GO Lab) has published its final evaluations of a pioneering UK government social outcomes fund aimed at helping the most vulnerable in society.
When launched in 2016, the UK government’s nine-year £70m Life Chances Fund was the biggest of its kind in the world. It aimed to help those facing the most significant barriers to leading happy and productive lives, financing 29 projects across England in areas like youth unemployment, mental health and homelessness, with over 50,000 beneficiaries.
The GO Lab's evaluation of the fund comes at a pivotal time, as a much larger successor fund is being developed by the UK government: the Better Futures Fund will be £1bn strong, with £500m invested by the UK government and a goal of matched investment from partners.
The Life Chances Fund and the Better Futures Fund are ‘outcomes funds’, which means that they help fund projects whose contracts are based on outcomes, rather than service delivery. In the area of unemployment, for example, the key measure – and the basis for paying government partners – would be how many people in the target group find and maintain work, not whether coaching sessions have been delivered. ‘Social outcomes partnerships’, as this type of project is known, aim to ensure that everyone involved is incentivised to make a genuine difference in people’s lives – and, in doing so, give the taxpayer value for money.
The GO Lab has been the UK government’s independent learning and evaluation partner on the Life Chances Fund since the start, and has now published the Life Chances Fund Final Report, which evaluates the fund overall and each of the 29 funded projects, as well as an Evaluation Synthesis Report, which distils nearly a decade of data and research on the fund into a single document.
The final evaluation finds that over 90% of the 54,213 individuals involved in funded projects achieved at least one of the intended outcomes, from children being in foster care rather than residential care to a reduction in hospital admissions for people with dementia. Some projects exceeded their target outcomes.
“Taken together, our findings suggest that well-designed and effectively managed partnerships can meaningfully improve outcomes”, says the Blavatnik School’s Eleanor Carter, Academic Director of the GO Lab and one of the report authors. “The detail of our evaluation offers lessons on how to design these partnerships well, how to manage them effectively, and how the costs – such as the complexity of managing multiple partners – might weigh against the benefits.”
The Blavatnik School’s Andreea Anastasiu, Executive Director of the GO Lab and one of the editors of the reports, says: “Governments around the world are using social outcomes partnerships and funds. While the lessons of our evaluation are context-specific, we hope they help policymakers and practitioners to understand the lessons and legacy of this pioneering programme, and build on them when developing new programmes to improve the life outcomes of people who face disadvantage.”
The Dean of the Blavatnik School, Professor Ngaire Woods, called the evaluations an “extraordinary body of evidence”, and said: “The Life Chances Fund Final Report traces the arc of a policy experiment from its inception through implementation and impact, offering a window into what works and what doesn’t, and – perhaps most crucially – why. As governments continue to navigate complex social challenges, the insights distilled here are vital: they shine a light on how cross-sector partnerships can be designed with greater accountability, how flexibility and innovation can be embedded in service delivery, and how data can guide smarter risk-taking in public policy. For those tasked with designing future programmes, allocating scarce resources, or shaping policy levers in times of uncertainty, this report is an essential guide.” She added: “The Blavatnik School’s mission has been vividly embodied in this long-standing collaboration with the UK government. Through it, the School has contributed an invaluable institutional memory to a rapidly evolving field, demonstrating the lasting value of rigorous, practically engaged research in delivering better public services.”
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The Government Outcomes Lab (GO Lab) is a global centre of expertise based at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford, with a mission to enable governments across the world to foster effective partnerships with the non-profit and private sectors for better outcomes.
