Making the Case for Public Realm Investment
This document provides guidance on how to appraise public realm projects and set a compelling case for intervention. This guidance includes step-by-step methodology on how to estimate and capture the economic and social benefits of public realm investment to inform the Value for Money Assessment.
Measuring Social Value Impacts
Description:
This event is the sixth in our ‘Measuring Impacts’ series. This series of workshops aimed to provide you with more detailed guidance and support for measuring impacts in your Business Cases across six topic areas. During each session, the presenters identified key resources and guidance to help you measure benefits and impacts in your Business Cases.
The session included a short presentation, with plenty of time allowed for discussion.
This session, on Measuring social value benefits / impacts covered:
What is social value and how it relates to other benefits and impacts
When to account for social value benefits and impacts in the business case
How to identify and measure social value benefits and impacts
Methodologies for monetising social value benefits and impacts
Ensuring delivery and how to maximise social value benefits and impacts
About the speaker:
Maria Vitale is an experienced social value practitioner who works to maximise social value and socio-economic outcomes for communities through design, procurement and all other project stages. She co-authored the Institute of Economic Development’s research publication, ‘From the Ground Up – Improving the Delivery of Social Value in Construction’, was a contributor to UKGBC’s “Framework for Defining Social Value”, and has completed Social Return on Investment (SROI) training. She is currently the Framework Social Value Lead for Arup’s Strategic Partnership with Bristol City Council.
Measuring Environmental Impacts
Description:
This event is the fifth in the ‘Measuring Impacts’ series. This series of workshops aimed to provide you with more detailed guidance and support for measuring impacts in your Business Cases across six topic areas. During each session, the presenters identified key resources and guidance to help you measure benefits and impacts in your Business Cases.
This recorded session, on environmental benefits provided an overview of the supplementary guidance to the Green Book covering the consideration of natural capital and environmental impacts in appraisal.
The event provided an overview of ENCA (Enabling a Natural Capital Approach) resources, including data, guidance and tools to help you understand natural capital and how to take it into account in project development and appraisal. It covered:
the natural capital framework
economic valuation of the environment
how project appraisal can incorporate natural capital
natural capital accounting principles and methods, benefits and challenges
applying natural capital at a local level
About the speaker:
Amy Carroll is an economist at Arup. Amy spent eight years working in the public sector as part of the Government Economic Service, including working in Defra and developing climate change policy. Amy has led development of a wide range of business cases and economic appraisals. As well as supporting the Towns Fund, Amy is currently working with the Environment Agency on climate resilience and adaptation strategies.
Measuring Health Impacts
Description:
This event is the fourth in our ‘Measuring Impacts’ series. This series of workshops aimed to provide you with more detailed guidance and support for measuring impacts in your Business Cases across six topic areas. During each session, the presenters identified key resources and guidance to help you measure benefits and impacts in your Business Cases.
This session, on Health and Wellbeing focused on the different approaches a Town can take to measure the direct or indirect impact of H&W interventions. This were drawn from the latest Green Book guidance and how to utilise Health Impact Assessments.
About the speaker:
Jenny Dunwoody has vast experience in conducting health impact assessments and has produced guides outlining how to calculate direct and indirect health benefits
Michael Towl has experience in liaising with Towns throughout the Towns Fund programme to help Towns apply Health and Wellbeing concepts
Economic Case: Best Practice Annex C - Culture and Heritage
This short guide is supplementary to the Economic Case: Best Practice Guide, and provides guidance on how to quantify and monetise economic benefits related to culture and heritage interventions.
This short guide is supplementary to the Economic Case: Best Practice Guide, and provides guidance on how to quantify and monetise economic benefits related to culture and heritage interventions.
The step-by-step guide on estimating economic benefits covers:
Tools and resources
Identifying economic benefits
Methodologies of quantifying benefits
General appraisal considerations
What if the benefits cannot be quantified?
Measuring Cultural and Heritage Impacts
Description:
This event is the third in our ‘Measuring Impacts’ series. This series of workshops aimed to provide you with more detailed guidance and support for measuring impacts in your Business Cases across six topic areas. During each session, the presenters identified key resources and guidance to help you measure benefits and impacts in your Business Cases.
This session focused on how to articulate the economic benefits/impacts of culture and heritage projects. This included an overview of DCMS’s Valuing Culture and Heritage Capital framework, as well as different methods to quantify economic benefits of cultural and heritage assets / interventions, and key appraisal considerations.
About the speaker:
Wendy Cheung is an experienced economics consultant at Arup specialising in business case development and economic appraisals of regeneration and infrastructure-led development. Wendy has a particular expertise in cost-benefit analysis and assessing the economic impacts of public sector-led proposals.
Drawing on six years of experience working with clients and multi-disciplinary teams to deliver robust and compelling business cases, Wendy had recently worked with a number of local councils to support both Future High Street Fund and Levelling Fund applications.
Measuring Transport Impacts
Description:
This event is the second in our ‘Measuring Impacts’ series. This series of workshops aimed to provide you with more detailed guidance and support for measuring impacts in your Business Cases across six topic areas. During each session, the presenters identified key resources and guidance to help you measure benefits and impacts in your Business Cases.
This session, on transport benefits, outlined the types of impact that can result from transport interventions, considerations that need to be made when measuring them and the data and tools that can be used towards this.
About the speaker:
Kieran Arter is a transport economist with 17 years of experience, and a business case specialist within the TFDP. He is experienced in estimating economic benefits across all modes of transport and has a detailed understanding of guidance on measuring transport impacts, such as the Department for Transport’s Transport Analysis Guidance.
Measuring Land Value Uplift Impacts
Description:
This event is the first in our ‘Measuring Impacts’ series. This series of workshops aimed to provide you with more detailed guidance and support for measuring impacts in your Business Cases across six topic areas. During each session, the presenters identified key resources and guidance to help you measure benefits and impacts in your Business Cases.
This session, on Measuring Land Value Uplift benefits / impacts covered:
General principles and approaches to assessing LVU impacts
Advice on the type of evidence needed to calculate LVU impacts
Advice on how LVU impacts can be used in business cases and BCR analysis
Case studies and examples on where LVU has been used
About the speaker:
Danny Collins is a Director of Economics at Savills with over 15 years experience of development consultancy, specialising in property market analysis and economic benefits assessment of major development projects, including new master planned communities, town centre studies, and infrastructure projects. Danny has particular expertise in developing the economic case for public sector investment projects and has undertaken detailed studies on the LVU impacts of major regeneration and infrastructure projects.
Economic Case: Best Practice Annex B - Development
This annex to our Economic Best Practice guide provides additional guidance on how to quantify and monetise economic benefits related to development and land-based interventions.
This short guide is supplementary to the Economic Case: Best Practice Guide, and provides additional information on how to quantify and monetise economic benefits related to development and land-based interventions, primarily residential, commercial and/or mixed-use development.
The step-by-step guide on estimating economic benefits covers:
Tools and resources
Identifying market failures
Identifying economic benefits
How to calculate economic benefits
Site-specific LVU
Wider LVU
Public realm improvements
Case study
Key considerations
Updates to TAG
DfT recently announced forthcoming changes to the Transport Appraisal Guidance (TAG) to be published officially in the guidance in July 2021. This document provides an overview of the key updates.
The Department for Transport (DfT) recently announced forthcoming changes to the Transport Appraisal Guidance (TAG) to be published officially in the guidance in July 2021. These include changes to:
Optimism Bias
Appraisal period and residual values
Capturing Local context
Uncertainty toolkit
Landscape monetisation guidance
This document provides an overview of the key updates to DfT’s Transport Appraisal Guidance (TAG). These changes should be considered by towns appraising transport projects, especially the Economic Case.
Distributional and place-based analysis
This guide provides detail about the questions that Towns should consider in approaching the distributional analysis required in their Business Cases. It also identifies the place based analysis that can be applied where appropriate, with signposting to relevant guidance documents.
As you progress the Business Case for each of your projects, the Economic Case will provide an assessment of the overall value for money of each project through its Benefit/Cost Ratio (BCR).
However, an overall BCR alone does not demonstrate how the impacts of the project could vary between different groups – for instance, people in different income bands or people of different ages or spatial areas.
The revised Green Book, published in November 2020, set out a requirement to identify the potential distributional impacts on different groups of people, and to produce place-based analysis for proposals with a geographical defined focus. The Delivery Partner produced a blog and guide on the revisions to the Green Book.
This guide goes into more detail about the questions that Towns should consider in approaching the distributional analysis required. It also identifies the place based analysis that can be applied where appropriate, with signposting to relevant guidance documents.
Economic Case: Best Practice Annex A - Active Travel
This short guide is supplementary to the Economic Case: Best Practice Guide, and provides additional information on how to quantify and monetise economic benefits related to active travel projects
This short guide is supplementary to the Economic Case: Best Practice Guide, and provides additional information on how to quantify and monetise economic benefits related to active travel projects, primarily projects designed to incentivise, facilitate and/or increase cycling and walking levels within a defined study area.
The step-by-step guide on estimating economic benefits covers:
Tools and resources
Identifying economic benefits
How to calculate economic benefits
Key considerations
Economic Case: Best Practice Guide
This guide provides Towns with general guidance for producing the Economic Case, from the approach to the Economic Case, to the Value for Money assessment.
This guidance is relevant for assisting Towns in developing compliant and effective Business Cases. The document will provide Towns with general guidance for producing the Economic Case, from the approach to the Economic Case, to the Value for Money assessment.
Accompanying this guidance, TFDP will be issuing separate supplementary annexes on how to quantify benefits by project types. The supplementary guidance will outline the potential benefits to consider, the relevant Green Book or appraisal guidance to comply with, quantification of benefits methodology, data requirements and more.
Links to these annexes will be added to this page, as they are made available.
Maximising Value for Money through Social Value
The purpose of this document is to show practical ways to include social value in your projects and business cases to increase the Value for Money.
The recent publication of the new Green Book and the Government's Social Value in Procurement Policy note signals an increasing focus is on the wider strategic benefits of public investment, and we hope this will be a useful guide to understand how to incorporate it in your business cases.
By looking at your projects through the lens of social value, you will be better able to describe the wider economic and social benefits that they can result in for your communities. Whilst this won’t entirely replace the traditional economic appraisal, it will help to explore and uncover some of the less quantifiable elements of your projects, which are never-the-less important .
The purpose of this document is to show practical ways to include social value in your projects and Business Cases to increase the Value for Money.
Economic Case Good Practice
This recording of our webinar explores the economic benefits that we would expect to analyse, including non-monetised benefits, and top tips for estimating them.
The Economic Case assess the costs and benefits of the proposed investments and the resulting value for money. This recording of our webinar explores the economic benefits that we would expect to analyse, including non-monetised benefits, and top tips for estimating them.
How to account for COVID-19 in your baseline
In developing a robust Business Case it is important to consider how COVID-19 has impacted your Town and how best to capture this in your baseline. The purpose of this resource is to assist in this process.
In developing a robust Business Case it is important to consider how COVID-19 has impacted your Town and how best to capture this in your baseline. The purpose of this resource is to assist in this process.
Within this spreadsheet we have brought together a selection of key COVID-19 datasets that can be used to understand the impact of COVID-19 on your area. Please note that in most cases this data relates to the local authority level. There will of course be a number of other datasets that will need to form the baseline for your business case. These datasets have not been included here as timing means that will not yet reflect the impact of COVID-19 on your town.
How to use
The 'COVID-19 data resources' spreadsheet provides links to the data source along with supporting information on the data and suggestions on how it could be used in the Business Case. Information provided includes:
Theme: Overarching theme relating to Social, Economic, or Other
Source: Name of data source
Data: Type of data/indicators provided by this source
Publisher: Publisher of the data source
Frequency: How often the data is published
Spatial level: Lowest spatial level that the data is available at
Use: How the data can be used
Application to business case: Why the data is relevant to your Business Case and suggestions on how it could be used
Link: Hyperlink to the source of data
Notes: Any additional instructions on how to access from the data from the link
Health and Wellbeing Dashboard
In developing a robust Town Investment Plan it is important to consider how any intervention will impact and improve the health and wellbeing of the population. This dashboard includes a selection of key health and wellbeing measures.
In developing a robust Town Investment Plan it is important to consider how any intervention will impact and improve the health and wellbeing of the population. An understanding of the existing health and wellbeing performance of a Town and the surrounding area is therefore crucial.
The purpose of this dashboard is to assist in this process. Within this dashboard we have brought together a selection of key health and wellbeing measures. The lack of health and wellbeing data published at a local level makes it challenging to access Town level data on health and wellbeing. For this reason we have included local authority level data alongside the Town level data. In addition we have included a national average which helps to identify any specific challenges (or opportunities).