This document featured on my LinkedIn page for some time, ostensibly to highlight to certain individuals that I am far from a “new convert” to social and sustainable investment, but I felt that after almost 15 years it is time to remove this in order to make room for other content which is perhaps a little more relevant to the work which I am currently doing. Nevertheless, I feel that this was an important examination of the situation at the time, even if only to a small group of interested parties. I may not agree with everything I then stated, I am a tad older and hopefully a little wiser than I once was. Arguably this was the paper that started me off on the journey to achieving my PhD 14 years later, yet I still can’t (won’t) write like an academic.
The intention was to have this handed to the then Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (IDS, now Sir IDS) in Edinburgh when he visited for an event organised by the group who asked me to write the paper. Given that his proposed benefits system reforms were less than popular, the event didn’t quite go according to plan. Angry protestors and projectile eggs may make for interesting media coverage but they can play havoc with organisational factors: The SOS came in through the rear entrance rather than face the crowd outside…and he never received his copy. I was interested (surprised) to see some of my words appear in someone else’s work a few years later. Imitation, it is said, is the sincerest form of flattery: Plagiarism is not.
Interestingly, social impact investments did get their tax breaks 3 years later (2014), in the form of SITR. This was (possibly, speculation) the least-used tax efficient strategy ever cooked up in the bowels of the Treasury. Nevertheless, the idea I presented here was not necessarily out of place with the thinking of the time (I would now argue that our language concerning the perpetual need for tax breaks for interventionist investments is part of the cause rather than a solution). Similarly, the idea of Government underwriting of social impact bonds is also something which has been experimented with, at least in Scotland. The Peterborough project came and went. (Government created an in house model which was not compatible with the SIB funding model so the project was scrapped. The in-house model has seen reoffending increase rather than decrease, in contrast with the SIB model which saw a 6% decrease in reoffending.) And we now have a “new” (2013) financial services regulator, which still tries to keep any form of direct impact investment as far from retail investors as it possibly can. In many cases for good reason, but there is an argument for consumer choice for those who have the capacity and willingness to invest. The financial planning community still avoids such investments like they have some kind of disease (see my thesis).
If anyone ever reads this I would welcome your thoughts, though I appreciate that this is highly unlikely. Nevertheless, happy reading, feel free to download, just don’t present other people’s work as your own, it shows a spectacular lack of integrity. 👀
Dr Alan Whittle, November 2025
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