£5.19: the value of £1 spent on confidence and skills for tenants

Planning for Real has been working with Ashram Housing Association, part of the Accord Housing Group to measure the social return on investment (SROI) of Ashram’s Employment and Skills Service. As part of this work we ran visual, participative and interactive workshops for residents to gather information on and understand the difference the employment and skills service makes to them as individuals.

Here is an extract from the coverage this SROI analysis received on the Guardian Professional website:

“Can you put a value on confidence? Or on the skills to get a job? According to Ashram Housing Association you can – and it’s £5.19. That’s the figure the association says every £1 it invests in its employment and skills service is worth in terms of helping people into work, increasing tenant well-being and reducing benefit dependency and rent arrears.

Ashram’s exhaustive analysis of its work with jobless residents is part of an increasing trend by housing providers to try to get to grips with the social value of the work they do. Chief executive Jas Bains says housing providers have been used to being tracked and measured by their regulators, but have rarely tried to analyse the long-term benefits of their work.

“There’s a cultural shift going on,” he says. “We have been accustomed to measuring the things we have been told to measure without asking, ‘how is this relevant?’. But now as we move from a grant-focused regime to one where we are looking for new investment routes, people are not going to be interested in just the number of outputs, they are going to be interested in our quality of life outcomes.”

For housing associations, Bains explains, measuring social value offers “huge opportunities” to extend the work they do. He believes Ashram’s analysis of its employment and skills work, using the social return on investment model, could prove his case that associations are equally, if not better, qualified than private providers to run government work programmes.”

You can read the full article is available on the Guardian Professional website.

This article was posted in News.