Public Safety committee  That's a great question. I think this tool works best when you can measure the outcome you care about and when the thing you can measure is a holistic indicator for what you're trying to achieve. If you can only measure a part of what you care about in terms of your social objective and you pay a lot of money based only on that part, you can distort performance toward the thing you can measure and away from other things that are important.

Public Safety committee  I think there's a little of each, but in our model, the Kennedy School SIB Lab model, what we're getting by working with 10 governments at once is some of that cross-fertilization. We bring together our fellows, who we put on the ground to help each state or each city themselves, but also the government officials they report to.

Public Safety committee  The specific interventions?

Public Safety committee  The states that are heading down this road are going to do competitive procurements to choose which providers are going to be chosen. There are in the United States several providers in this space that have had very rigorous evaluations of their programs. The most famous one is called Nurse-Family Partnership, which has had I think three randomized controlled trials of their studies, but there are some others out there that maybe you could have your staff follow up with me on.

Public Safety committee  In some models being tested—and I'm thinking particularly of the Roca model, which is the one being used to work with the young men in Massachusetts—the model really is explicitly designed to meet the individuals where they are and to figure out which services they need. Some individuals need educational services before they're ready to get job training services.

Public Safety committee  That's a great question. On the early childhood ones we're seeing two very different kinds of programs being developed in multiple states. One is really early childhood, like six months before birth through the first two years of life, where the goal is to make sure the mother has a healthy pregnancy, and the first outcome that is tracked is the share of births that are low birth weight with the hope of reducing health care costs by having fewer low birth weight births, and then lower medical expenditures in the first couple years of life because the children were born healthier.

Public Safety committee  I see. We're using this tool in the United States mostly in areas where government is already procuring social services from non-profit service providers. Often, even in those circumstances, government will build in protections—the right to investigate or audit or whatever—and there is no reason why those kinds of provisions can't be part of a pay-for-success contract as well.

Public Safety committee  I think Mr. Butler answered that one well. But I think you're absolutely right that if you have a terrific program, like the one you described a moment ago that's working great, that's not where you use this tool. This is a tool to apply to a place where you don't have the results you need and you need a better way to collaborate with the service providers to get better results.

Public Safety committee  That's a great question. When you're setting up one of these projects, the government is choosing what the contract terms should be and whether or not to enter into one of these. You can build whatever accountability mechanisms you want into these contracts. In general the thing people are not trying to do is tell people exactly how to deliver the services.

Public Safety committee  In just about every project we've been involved in, we've had to focus the projects on the highest-need and highest-risk individuals. If that is an early childhood intervention, you want to find the neighbourhoods where the most people are not showing up to kindergarten ready for school, and focus resources there.

Public Safety committee  Yes. The research is ongoing, because we're testing the model—

Public Safety committee  —but I'm definitely thinking about that question.

Public Safety committee  That's a great question. The key thing is that all of these projects are pretty new, so in terms of their impact on the ultimate outcomes, we still have to be patient. You serve people for a couple a years, you wait a couple of years to see if they reoffend, and then you know what happened.

Public Safety committee  Professor, Dr., Mr.; whatever you want to call me is fine.

Public Safety committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee, for inviting me to join you remotely here today. I know that you've heard several testimonies previously on social finance broadly, and also on the pay-for-success or social impact bond technique. What I have to offer is that for the last two years I've been leading a team that has been providing pro bono assistance on the government side of these projects to eight state governments and two city governments around the U.S.