St Mungo’s won a contract for a further £750,000 from Westminster Council to provide homeless criminal justice and anti-social behaviour services (Contract Award Notice No.: 2011/S 82-134713) It successfully competed for a piece of a £982,563 multiple awardees contract award from Westminster City Council to provide city-wide building-based intervention services for rough sleepers (Contract Award Notice No.: 2011/S 154-255757; Contract No.: 1), described in the contract as: "A comprehensive service to reduce the numbers of people sleeping rough on the streets of Westminster to as close to zero as possible. " St Mungo’s won a £270,000 contract from Bath and North East Somerset Council to provide a “Building Bridges to Wellbeing” service (Contract Award Notice No.: 2011/S 177-289866), focussed on persons with mental health problems In 2011, St won a grant of £229,000 to set up a homelessness initiative in Bristol On March 20, 2012, St Mungo’s won a £1.2 million contract award from Hertfordshire County Council to provide health and social work services (Contract Award Notice No.: 2012/S 55-089129). On November 15, 2012, St Mungo’s won part of a £70 million multiple awardees contract award from London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham to provide support services related to the development of civic and community amenities (Contract Award Notice No.: 2012 / S 219-360312; Lot No.: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10). The amounts in contracts are staggeringly large by the standards of many homelessness programmes, but each such contract pushes the limits of St Mungo’s to administer and execute the services it has contracted to provide. This stretching makes the organization vulnerable, as it does not have the capacity or buffer to withstand sudden changes in government policy or funding. In addition, changes to European Union funding have had dramatic impacts. Money from the European Social Fund
with SIBs, the funding arrangements for the London Homelessness SIB deliberately duplicate some administrative costs. This is because the total funding is being split equally between St Mungo’s and a competitor organization called Thames Reach (). Each of these organizations will have to administer the contracts and implement management oversight of services they provide to the 200 cohort members assigned to them. The driving factor here therefore appears to be competition, not cost savings. This is entirely consistent with neoliberal governance, according to Willse (), who argues that the individual homeless person is not the primary target of neoliberal governance. Rather, the target is the social services sector itself, and its transformation from a cost of government to an engine of the economy, where entrepreneurialism and competition drive innovation and employment. Competition between St Mungo’s and Thames Reach is structured into the contractual model, with outcome measures rather than treatment standards driving the agreement between funders and service providers: The payment by results approach has allowed the providers flexibility to innovate. In particular, by not issuing a service specification and instead focusing on outcomes providers have been able to develop approaches that respond the needs of service users. () It is therefore an aspiration of the financial model that the two service providers will execute their duties in different ways, seeking to be more effective and efficient at dealing with their homeless individuals than the other provider was. Development of the SIB It is interesting to see how financial capacity, as opposed to service expertise, played a role in the awarding of the contracts to these two providers. Our interviewees at the Greater London Authority said that Social Finance provided the initial business case for the overall project, which the GLA then took to the homelessness sector in successive drafts. Organizations in the sector commented on these drafts, and the GLA made adjustments. For instance, the up-front fee for “reconnection” was increased. According to our interviewee at Triodos Bank, Triodos was then engaged by the GLA in the first half of