Social value? All you have to do is ask- and now you can.

Accessing the new dawn in social value - definition, democratisation and doing it.

On the 24th September 2021, State of Life and Social Value UK were joined by Nancy Hey from the What Works Centre for Wellbeing and Paul Frijters from LSE. The event was to explain the new, July 2021, HM Treasury Green Book Supplementary Guidance on wellbeing and the new WELLBY measure. Here’s a few of the key points, questions that came up.

Context is all - social value defined. It’s wellbeing. 

The speakers explained that the HM Treasury Green Book is considered the go-to / bible for evaluation of projects and policies. And the 2020 Green Book defines social value clearly:

2.3 Appraisal The appraisal of social value, also known as public value, is based on the principles and ideas of welfare economics and ...therefore includes all significant costs and benefits that affect the welfare and wellbeing of the population, not just market effects. 

This has been a significant transformation of the last 10 years to put wellbeing at the centre of policy evaluation and social value rather than something considered interesting and experimental back in 2011. It helps everyone by putting to bed a few of the debates around what constitutes social value.

Turning theory into practice - the new 2021 HMT Supplementary Guidance on wellbeing.

With this shift to wellbeing as a central policy objective, the new, 2021 HMT Treasury supplementary guidance: wellbeing comes at an important time to help everyone better understand, apply and measure wellbeing.

As Nancy Hey explained - these are big theoretical questions on what makes our lives worth living. And this is why it’s important that the practical measurement of them becomes ‘democratised’ i.e. much more available, affordable and practical. Fortunately the 2021 Green Book has some excellent explanations, tools and advice.

Chapter 5 advises to ‘use validated measures that are consistent with existing measures’. This is something State of Life has been doing for two years and both the What Works Centre for Wellbeing and State of Life offer banks of relevant survey questions and measures in line with the guidance.

A new unit of social value - the WELLBY. All you need to do is ASK…

A massive jump forward was explained by Paul Frijters - the WELLBY, a new open, transparent measure of wellbeing economic value. The WELLBY can be linked to the NHS measure of economic value - the QALY. This adds a whole new dimension of democratisation to social value (anyone can use it) and a credibility to NHS values.

And as Nancy made clear - to use the WELLBY all you need to do is ask. You just have to ask the people you work with about their life satisfaction (and other outcomes you think relevant) and to collect information on who they are, where they live and other relevant demographics. The good news is that the technology and methodologies are now making this much easier, with State of Life leading the way.

The new Green Book guidance and social value banks

This is a new and fast moving area of policy and economics but the new 2021 Green Book supplementary guidance will help us all to define, understand and measure social value. And to do it credibly and robustly.

Social value banks have been around for a while and have served a useful purpose but can be problematic. There are crucial steps to measuring social value in line with the new guidance - the need to ask those you are working with to reveal the impact of your project.

This step can be skipped all too easily with value banks, which is a big problem for the social value movement. The result is and will be that this important sector with the potential to create a more progressive society could start to lose credibility and trust. This risks  incentivising organisations to ‘play the value bank game’ rather than optimise the social value they create, or at the heart make people's lives better! 

Collecting good data just got practical and affordable

At times social value banks can fail the ‘sniff test’ that the new Treasury Guidance Chapter 5 spells out as good practice. All you have to do is ask (the people you help) and now, with the new Treasury 2021 Guidance: wellbeing - there is all the advice you need and the tools, technology and tips are available.

And if you need a bit of help - at State of Life we have the tools and tech to make this easier.

Also - Social Value UK do a great job of keeping folks up to date in this area by hosting online and real life events (remember them) - join up here.