Social Impact Investing

SOCIAL IMPACT INVESTMENT: BUILDING THE EVIDENCE BASE
5.18 An example of how SII can meet demand for affordable housing comes from the United
Kingdom’s Tesco Supermarket chain which recently responded to debates on housing needs (as well as
changing demand form their customer base) by unlocking it’s land banks for housing projects (reportedly
including their own GBP 1 billion house-building project [see Guardian, 2014]). Contributions to housing
stock, particularly when unlocking banked land, should contribute to macro-social goals for increasing
available, and in turn affordable, housing stock (for a detailed discussion of the range and definitions of
what constitutes a social impact investment see Chapter 4).
5.2.1.4 Policing, safety and crime
5.19 Crime is a blight on societies, and depending on the severity of the crime experienced, can have
severe personal and social impacts. Reducing crime and the fear of crime are major social goals, and
whether present systems are coping with expectations or not will provide an insight as to whether SII has a
role in this sector.
5.20 Crime statistics are difficult to interpret accurately because they often rely on crimes being
reported, and convicted, and this may result in important variations in different countries (and in turn
national-level reporting biases). For this reason nationally-relative measures of contact with the police are
report in Table 5.2, and show that although numbers are rising overall, and in France and Italy (but not for
Italian juveniles), most countries report lower rates of people being in formal contact with the police since
the mid-2000s.
5.21 Whether increases in contact with the police are a proxy for improvement in policing, and an
improvement in overall safety is generally open to debate (lower rates might equally be due to higher risks
and lower policing standards), and so indicators of safety and policing are also reported in Table 5.2.
Results for confidence in policing and feeling safe in your locality would suggest that increased contact
with police in France does not proxy a worsening social situation. In fact, across all countries, both
confidence in the police and feeling safe in the locality at night have improved (with the exception of small
falls in the latter indicator in Italy and Japan). For SII, although social outcomes seem to be improving in
this sector, innovation may still be required, because progress is slow in many countries, and on average 3
in 10 people still report feeling unsafe outside at night or not having trust in the police.
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