The Life Chances Fund (LCF) is an £80m fund, which aims to help those people in society who face the most significant barriers to leading happy and productive lives. This forms part of the Prime Minister’s Life Chances Strategy.
The £80m has been committed by central government to contribute to outcome payments for payments by results (PbR) contracts which involve socially minded investors - i.e. 
towards Social Impact Bonds (SIBs). These contracts must be locally commissioned and aim to tackle complex social problems.
The fund will aim for contributions of c. 20% of total outcomes payments, with local commissioners paying for the majority of the outcomes payments. However the level of contribution from the LCF will be refined to reflect the balance in savings that are generated for the wider public sector. Where the rate of savings to central government are relatively low and/or the immediate savings to the local commissioner are very high, levels of contribution will be refined to reflect this.
Based on similar funds, the LCF could leverage a further £320m in outcomes payments from local commissioners, creating a total pot of £400m for outcomes contracts.
The overall objective of the £80m Life Chances Fund is to help those people in society who face the most significant barriers to leading happy and productive lives.
It will do this by:
• Increasing the number and scale of SIBs in England;
• Making it easier and quicker to set up a SIB;
• Generating public sector efficiencies by delivering better outcomes and using this to understand how cashable savings are;
• Increasing social innovation and building a clear evidence base of what works;
• Increasing the amount of capital available to a wider range of voluntary, community and social enterprise (VCSE) sector providers to enable them to compete for public sector contracts;
• Providing better evidence of the effectiveness of the SIB mechanism and the savings that are being accrued; and
• Growing the scale of the social investment market.
Fund themes
The LCF will issue themed call outs, or invitations for bids from applicants for SIBs across six themes.
The first two themes will be as follows:
• Drug and alcohol dependency – e.g. early diagnosis and treatment1
• Children’s services – e.g. reducing time spent in residential care, preventing entry into care
Future themes will be:
• Young people – e.g. NEET prevention, youth unemployment and youth justice
• Early years – e.g. early intervention, school preparedness and education
• Healthy lives – e.g. long term health conditions, public health interventions
• Older people’s services – e.g. independent living, adult social care and social isolation
For further information and to apply, visit: www.gov.uk/government/publications/life-chances-fund, or email: [email protected]
Deadline: Friday 30 September 2016