Yes. It is a strictly and tightly defined process where the public managers will look at the outcomes that they are seeking to achieve as specified to some degree—the outcomes they're trying to achieve, proof of those outcomes, and also the amount that they're willing to pay for those outcomes.
What that does is two things. One, it brings a degree of rigour, which you don't only get through a social impact bond, but it does come through a social impact bond. There's a second thing that we've started to discover within the U.K., which is a focus on outcomes starts to become a coordinating language.
Perhaps I can give a very practical example. In the U.K. we recently set up a £30-million social impact bond fund aimed at preventing youths becoming unemployed. What it was doing was intervening in youths aged 14 to 17 to improve things like their school attendance and their grades, because we know there's a very high correlation between those sorts of outcomes among those aged 14 to 17 and the risk of somebody becoming unemployed at age 18 to 21.
What my team did, what the bureaucrats did here, was that we went around to different public service departments and asked, “How much do you benefit from that 18-year-old not becoming unemployed?” They all said different amounts. Our department for benefits benefited the most for not paying unemployment benefits, but for example our Ministry of Justice and our Department of Health also saw benefits from this. They all essentially put in as much money into the pot as benefits that they gained from it.
The reason I go into some detail on that example is just to say that this focus on outcomes might be a way that we get around some of the silo spending streams that we sometimes see around trying to support people with complex needs.