UK Government launches £500m outcomes-focused Better Futures Fund

The launch of the Better Futures Fund is a clear and welcome commitment by the UK Government to invest in and improve the life chances of hundreds of thousands of children nationwide.

The Government today has announced it is allocating £500 million to the Better Futures Fund, an outcomes payments fund spanning ten years – with plans to match this figure with up to £500 million from local government and philanthropists, and an aim to support 200,000 children, young people and their families.

The largest fund of its kind globally, the Better Futures Fund will focus on providing early support to children and young people, preventing problems from escalating during childhood and later into adulthood. It will ensure vulnerable children are able to access better opportunities and safer homes, to build strong foundations for the future.

The Government will commission Social Outcomes Partnerships to deliver this support, a model which is grounded in over fifteen years of best practice. This is a significant milestone for the Impact Economy movement generally.

Outcomes Partnerships enable local authorities, local communities, charities, social enterprises, social investors and philanthropists to work closely together to design and deliver flexible, holistic services centred around the needs of individuals facing complex, interconnected challenges. The approach looks at the whole person, works to understand what they really need, and empowers them to help themselves – which is, ultimately, the best way to create sustainable change in their lives.

Focusing on outcomes gives delivery teams the freedom to tailor their solutions locally and individually – collecting and analysing impact data dynamically in order to learn from what works and to innovate and iterate to make programmes more effective, achieving better outcomes. The Better Futures Fund will focus on catalysing meaningful, measurable improvements in a range of areas affecting young people. These could include enabling better family stability, reducing youth reoffending, and tackling homelessness.

Many children and young people who do not meet statutory support requirements, but are nevertheless in need, slip through the cracks; the Better Futures Fund is a positive signal of intent by the Government to address this issue and break down existing barriers as part of its Child Poverty Strategy and wider Plan for Change.

Mila Lukic, CEO and founder of BOP, commented: “The Better Futures Fund indicates the UK Government’s ambition to seriously address systemic challenges which have historically been reinforced by taking a one-size-fits-all approach to solutions. In choosing to fund person-centred, outcomes-focused programmes, the Government is enabling a more flexible, personalised, local, and collaborative approach to public service delivery.

The fund aims not only to significantly improve the life chances of our young people; I’m hopeful it will foster innovation and encourage new and preventative, data-, trust- and relationship-led approaches to complex social issues, for those who need them most.”

Managed by the Department for Media, Culture and Sport, the fund follows on from the Life Chances Fund, a similar £70m fund created to help people facing significant barriers to lead happy and productive lives. This announcement represents an endorsement of the Social Impact Investment Advisory Group’s recommendations on harnessing impact capital to advance the Government’s missions and reform agenda.

BOP has been a pioneer of this way of working over the last 10+ years. The UK now counts over 100 partnerships across a large number of areas like family therapy, youth homelessness prevention and youth mental wellbeing – including BOP’s hugely impactful Stronger Families, GMBOP, and Turning Tides. BOP’s work has supported 66,000+ people in the UK and catalysed an estimated £1.8bn of public value according to independent analysis.