Since 2015, the Mental Health Employment Partnership (MHEP) has enabled 25 local authority and NHS partners and 9 Individual Placement Support (IPS) service providers across London and Shropshire to support 2046 vulnerable people — those with severe mental illness, substance misuse and addiction, learning disabilities and autism — into work.
21-year-old Sabiha Malik, who has learning difficulties, is just one of the hundreds of MHEP success stories (there is a video of Sabiha lower down this page).
When I got my first pay, I remember I screamed the house down and to my brothers and sisters I said, “Guess who got paid!” My parents are really happy. They are proud of me and they go, “Yeah, yeah you have achieved a lot.”
Sabiha Malik, Hospitality worker, KMPG Canteen, Tower Project
It’s important to note that although this gives us an interesting insight into the different work challenges that might be faced by the different cohorts, providers reported that they sometimes had difficulty gathering evidence from people after they started working.
The addiction service in particular found it hard to stay in touch with clients, so it’s possible that the 3‑month sustainment figure for this cohort may actually be much higher.
In 2015 Social Finance set up the Mental Health Employment Partnership — a Social Impact Bond, now known as a social outcomes partnership — as a way of combining national outcomes based funding for employment support together with local health and wellbeing funding.
The aim was help solve the problem of people with severe mental illness being excluded from paid work using a personalised employment support model — Independent Placement and Support (IPS). Over nine years MHEP brought together 25 local authorities and NHS trusts, and enabled nine providers to deliver IPS services.
Watch the video to find out more from Adam Swersky former CEO of Social Finance who was part of the original MHEP team; Helen Spice, an MHEP board member since 2017 and who served as its Chair from 2021; and Madeline Goldie a Social Finance Manager who led the MHEP project for the final 18 months.
MHEP was a separate entity into which all the investment funding was paid and from where all the contracts with national funders, local funders and in some cases with providers, were managed.
MHEP had it’s own board with representation from the investors and Social Finance as well as a number of independent experts from health services, mental health services and employment services.
The Social Finance team were really very supportive and certainly helped me in terms of analysing data; what to do with the data we had and how to use it. That’s what really benefited me as a team leader, in supporting the team to achieve good, healthy outcomes for everybody. Having that regular contact and review with MHEP, it built that robustness into what we were doing
Matt Morris, Senior IPS Specialist, Enable
All the MHEP statutory partners have found a way to continue to fund IPS services out of their own budgets since the MHEP contracts wound down, ensuring these services continue to support people into work who otherwise risk long-term unemployment.
The nine IPS employment services were able to continue, not just because they were successful getting people into work, but also because through MHEP the service providers received performance management support from Social Finance. In addition Social Finance helped both the commissioners and providers to build a culture of mission driven collaboration.
One of those services is Enable in Shropshire which supports people with mental health issues into work. In the video below Matt Morris, a senior IPS Specialist explains how it works and why the Social Finance team was essential to its success and sustainability.
Although she struggled at school with her learning difficulties, after receiving personalised one-to-one employment support, Sabs found her niche working in the canteen of a large firm in Canary Wharf in London. When she first arrived at the Tower Project, an MHEP-funded IPS service for people with learning disabilities and autism, Sabs was too shy to even speak, as she explains in this video.
There is a large existing evidence base showing that people with mental health conditions, learning disabilities and autism face the lowest employment rates in the UK (almost 30 percentage points lower than the population average).
Despite this, 30–50% of this cohort are capable of work, and able to benefit from the wide range of secondary benefits provided by meaningful employment including physical, mental, social and financial benefits. MHEP services have helped increase access across London and Shropshire to services that bridge this gap.
MHEP provided funding, performance management support and operational expertise as a co-commissioner to a total of nine different services across London and Shropshire.
In most cases, MHEP was helping local areas to commission an IPS or IPS-style supported employment programme for the first time, embedding this evidence-based approach into the statutory service array and building relationships between clinical teams and IPS providers to expand the support options around people experiencing severe mental health, or addiction and substance misuse issues.
All the MHEP statutory partners have found a way to continue to fund IPS services out of their own budgets since the MHEP contracts wound down, ensuring these services continue to support people into work who otherwise risk long-term unemployment. Many commissioners have also continued to explore outcomes-based payment or learning mechanisms used by MHEP to drive up outcomes.
The first interim evaluation of MHEP found that MHEP provided additional value compared with ‘traditional’ commissioning approaches. Along with additional investment and funding for IPS services, MHEP’s performance management function was seen by commissioners and providers to give an additional outcomes-focus, supported by high quality data and insights to drive service improvement.
One commissioner interviewed for the evaluation reflected that MHEP ‘[brought] a huge amount of extra intelligence into our system that we just wouldn’t have otherwise’.
MHEP was also described by stakeholders as pioneering a new ‘relational’ approach to commissioning that focused on collaborative problem solving and learning between providers, ICBs and commissioners.
Another interviewee commented: ‘having that third dimension, from MHEP’s input … would change the way that we commission…look at services…look at data, and the way that we would work together on a contract”, and that MHEP has been an effective ‘gateway’ for local authorities to ‘look at commissioning in a different way’.
At Social Finance we are concerned not just with individual programme-level outcomes, but with the ‘big’ outcomes – more inclusive economies, healthier populations, thriving local places. For us, MHEP is part of a wider effort across our Skills and Employment practice to build a more inclusive economy that distributes the many benefits of meaningful, sustained employment more widely, especially to groups at risk of exclusion.
Using our Routes to Scale approach as a framework, we could think of MHEP (along with IPS Grow) as a mechanism to help us spread new evidence-based solutions (IPS) across the system, and catalyse new, sustained funding from local authorities and ICBs for these services. But there’s more to be done.
If we look at the other ‘building blocks’ of lasting change, the next set of challenges for us to tackle, building on what we’ve learnt through MHEP, are around advocating for a new public conversation around accessible employment, unlocking regulatory barriers (e.g. around Access to Work), and championing new cross-sector ways of working between employment services, NHS services, VCSEs, treatment services housing providers and other providers that create seamless and sustainable pathways to meaningful lasting employment for those at risk of exclusion.
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