SOCIAL ENTERPRISE DAY: Reduce your impact measurement tools, says top lawyer

The UK needs one standard method of measuring social return on investment if it is going to have any impact on commissioners, says a top lawyer.

Speaking on Social Enterprise Day, Ray Mills, a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC), said different methods of measuring the impact of a social enterprise would not help them into a level playing field.

Instead, there needed to be just one recognised method that could be used by social enterprises and organisations working in both the public and private sectors.

'Despite the great work some organisations are doing, you don't yet have one standardised measure of SROI. There's a need to simplify and share so the Treasury can get behind you and commissioners can be confident in using it,' he said at today's Future of Public Services conference, hosted by The Guardian.

He added that social enterprises must be prepared for fiercer competition with the private sector if SROI became mainstream.

'We at PWC could show a social return on investment, as could companies like Serco,' he said.

'There's competition out there.'

Eilís Lawlor, head of valuing what matters at the New Economics Foundation (NEF), said that while the term SROI was used to describe a general social return, it should refer to the official methodology developed to calculate and measure SROI.

However, she agreed that SROI needed to be more widely used and recognised.

'It needs to be built in to a business, like the financial accounts,' she said.

Ceri Jones, head of policy at the Social Enterprise Coalition, agreed and added that the added-value savings needed to be more obvious. '

'There's not a mechanism that shows the savings in the wider areas,' she said.

'SROI is fantastic, but it's not the only way to measure your impact.'