Research and analysis

Life Chances Fund final report: Executive summary

Published 5 March 2026

What is the Life Chances Fund

The Life Chances Fund was a £70 million programme funded by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), and administered by The National Lottery Community Fund (TNLCF). It was the largest outcomes fund launched to date in the UK. It ran between 2016-2025. The Life Chances Fund was designed to tackle complex social problems across policy areas, including child and family welfare, homelessness, health and wellbeing, employment and training, and more. The Life Chances Fund was delivered through 29 locally-commissioned social outcomes partnerships (also known as social impact bonds). These partnerships used outcomes-based contracts where payments were tied to the achievement of measurable social outcomes.

This report is part of a wider set of evaluations the Government Outcomes Lab undertook for DCMS as their knowledge and learning partner for the Life Chances Fund. More on the Life Chances Fund and social outcomes partnerships can be found on the Government Outcomes Lab website. This report covers one aspect of the overall LCF Evaluation Strategy.

About the report

This is the final report in the Life Chances Fund evaluation series. It presents findings on project performance in terms of outcome achievements and payments. The report focuses on the final outcomes achieved by the 29 Life Chances Fund projects. It aims to answer these questions:

1. To what extent have these 29 social outcomes partnerships achieved their intended outcomes?

2. To what extent have these 29 social outcomes partnerships achieved the intended level of outcome payments?

The Life Chances Fund projects 

29 different projects delivered services and received outcome payments: 

• 18 projects completed service delivery and received their final Life Chances Fund outcome payments by September 2024. This report presents their final performance data. 

• 11 projects had also received their last Life Chances Fund payment by September 2024 but received further funding to continue delivering their services with exclusive funding from local commissioners. For these, only interim performance data is included.

When considering averages or comparisons across projects, it is worth noting that the Life Chances Fund projects delivered very different interventions for people with complex needs. This makes them very difficult to compare against each other. In addition, each project has a unique list of outcomes metrics that they are pursuing. Even when projects have been labelled with the same policy theme, they might be pursuing substantially different outcome metrics. Due to these differences, this report calculates the achievement of the primary outcome for each project and compares that achievement against the best-case scenario target set by the project at the beginning of the contract. For more detail on specific projects, a project fact sheet is available at the start of each project’s chapter.

Key findings

Outcome achievements

• The 18 completed projects achieved an average of 87% of their primary outcome targets. The primary outcome is not necessarily the hardest to achieve nor the outcome worth the highest cost. It is self-selected by each project as the most relevant outcome for their cohort.
• Performance varied widely: some projects exceeded 100% of their primary outcome (eg. Chances); others achieved 20% of expected primary outcomes (eg. Pyramid Project).  

• Children’s services averaged 62% of primary outcomes (often impacted by COVID-era foster placement challenges). 

• Healthy lives projects averaged 70% of primary outcomes, although data is interim data for four ongoing projects.

• Young people and addiction-related projects performed strongly, achieving 97% and 86% of their primary outcomes, respectively.

• Early years and older people’s services projects exceeded 100% of primary outcomes.

It is worth noting that ongoing service delivery may affect final outcomes and payments. Local commissioners may have captured data in different ways to that used in these reports.

Table 1: Primary outcomes achievement as a proportion of best case scenario targets by LCF theme

LCF projects	Number of projects	Average	Maximum	Minimum
Children’s services	5	62%	98%	20%
Drug and alcohol dependency	3	86%	115%	36%
Early years	3	111%	136%	75%
Young people	6	97%	111%	82%
Older people’s services	1	207%	No data	No data
Healthy lives	9	70%	141%	24%
Other cross-cutting themes	2	118%	131%	105%

Funding and investment^{[footnote 1]}

Headline funding statistics for the LCF are as follows: 

£48.6m in outcomes funding was committed by the LCF

 

£41.6m (85.6% of funds) was actually spent on outcomes by the LCF

£27.4m (vs. £29m originally committed) was provided to projects in social investment

£0.1m to £4.8m was the range of social investment provided to projects

1.04 was the median Net Money Multiple return for completed projects

£125.8m (77% of total committed) was spent in total on outcomes by the LCF and local commissioners

Reach and impact 

Headline statistics on programme reach (by Sept 2024) are as follows: 

130,345 people were referred to LCF projects

54,213 people engaged in LCF projects (42% of those referred) 

48,904 people achieved at least one outcome (90% of engaged users) 

Lessons learnt from a data collection perspective

1. Improved measurement of outcome achievements

To improve the measurement of outcome achievements, future programmes should ensure that data systems capture both outcome metrics and the underlying payment triggers. This means not only recording how many outcomes were achieved (eg. education milestones) but also detailing the specific steps taken (eg. enrolment, achieving different qualification levels etc.). It is equally important to track the number of unique individuals achieving outcomes to distinguish between progress made by a single person versus multiple participants – this could be aided through ensuring consistency between payment triggers that can only be achieved once compared with those that can be achieved multiple times by the same individual. Additionally, systems should support and incentivise the reporting of outcomes achieved beyond contractual caps to enable more accurate assessments of project value and impact.

2. Improved tracking of changes

Increasingly, some social outcome partnerships are being characterised for their relational way of working. In practice, this means that they change and adapt over the course of the programme. This entails agreeing changes in metrics, targets, evidence requirements, payments, etc. In terms of a database, the initial plans of a project are usually stored in a baseline form. Relational projects have the capacity to renegotiate that baseline form many times. In the future, databases should be better at tracking the original commitment, and keeping track of changes separately, so that evaluators can narrate the evolution of the partnership and evaluate which changes generated better results for the partnership, and which changes did not serve the purpose of better social outcomes for the cohort.

3. Better data definitions

Most of the data collection efforts were led by the projects themselves. Each time they completed a baseline form, or submitted a quarterly payment claim, projects were populating the database that underpins this report. TNLCF shared instructions for projects before completing forms for the DCMS Data Portal. However, some projects were not consistent in using these data definitions across the life of the project. Reasons for the inconsistency can include key employees moving onto different roles and new employees making different assumptions, or the data definitions in initial instructions being broad and not providing accurate guidelines on how to calculate complex figures such as investment returns, cost savings or management costs. In the future, data definitions should be clear, exhaustive and should not leave room for ambiguity. Data definitions should be agreed by the delivery partnership (central government, local commissioners and the organisation managing the fund) to make sure that the end result is a database that can answer the initial research questions that guide the learning and evaluation efforts. This means that instructions should be carefully designed and tested by the fund, but also that projects will need to have resources and capabilities for completing complex forms for the Data Portal.

1. Additional information on investment return is available in Section 3.8. These investment figures were provided by Better Society Capital and it has not been possible to validate investment values with administrative data. ↩