Identifying Who Will Benefit
Who are the project’s direct and indirect beneficiaries?
It has now been established that the project should:
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Deliver economic growth across the priority areas in WMCA (Stage 1)
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Deliver outcomes that are not inconsistent with inclusive growth (Stage 2)
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It is now important to consider the direct and indirect impacts of the project. This will be done in two ways
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By assessing whether the project is targeted at population groups who are not as likely to benefit from macroeconomic growth
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By identifying wider positive impacts through promoting Good Growth through procurement and business/institutional practices.
We have identified five priority groups at this point. These are:
- Residents who are out of employment
- In work, low earning individuals
- Individuals with low skill levels
- Young people not in education, employment or training (NEET)
- Residents living in areas of high deprivation 6.
- For more detailed analysis on the impact of a project on different segments of the population, a full distributional analysis, following the Green Book, could be undertaken.
WMCA inclusive growth target groups - definition
Residents who are out of employment
Working age residents who are unemployed or economically inactive. It might be useful to identify and monitor three sub-groups:
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Unemployed residents (all working ages)
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Young unemployed (under 25)
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Particularly disadvantaged ethnic communities
In-work, low-earning individuals
- Residents or workers earning below the ‘real’ living wage (LW). The living wage is calculated annually by the Living Wage Foundation (£9.00 per hour in 2018/19, outside London).
Individuals with low skill levels
- Residents or workers with qualifications below NVQ level 2 (either NVQ1 or no formal qualification).
Young people not in education, employment or training
- Residents aged 16-24 who are not in Education, Employment or Training (NEET).
Residents living in areas of high deprivation
- People living in deprived neighbourhoods. These neighbourhoods can be defined through aggregation of small geographical areas, informed by data from the multiple deprivation indices and any relevant locally collected information.
Identifying the direct beneficiaries
We suggest that you assess each project by identifying the groups of people who may directly benefit from the project. This exercise can be used to back a qualitative judgement of how inclusive growth oriented the project is, based on the 5 IG target groups listed on the previous page or, if you choose to, to go one step further and quantify these beneficiaries, by estimating the number of people in each target group.
The information for both the qualitative and a potential quantitative approach may be available in sources, including:
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Project documentation
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As part of work undertaken for existing appraisal frameworks, such as the Treasury’s Green Book
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Local sources such as JSNA, baselining documents etc.
If it is unclear from the project documentation who would benefit, you may need to consider the type of project and assume who is likely to benefit. For example, an investment focused on high skilled/ high growth activities that will require highly skilled staff is unlikely to target people in the lowest income quintile.
Social baselining may be useful here through the creation of an asset map or Joint Strategic Needs Assessment which underpins and gives ready access to data which might be useful to estimate inclusive growth outcomes.
We would encourage you to speak to the Office of Data Analytics who can support this kind of approach.
This may also be an opportunity to consider how a project could be shaped to support an inclusive economy. For example, would a retail academy that supports unemployed people to gain the skills needed to access jobs in a new retail development help increase the inclusive growth dimension? If so, how can this be put in place?
In the longer-term, you may want to consider ensuring project documentation contains the types of information needed to assess whether a project has an inclusive growth dimension.
Beneficiaries should not be double counted. Even if there are multiple impacts (such as jobs that pay above minimum wage and are with an employer that provide career ladders or jobs that pay above minimum wage and are accessed through improved transport links), the number of beneficiaries identified should be the total number of individuals who will be positively affected.
A scorecard is provided in the worksheet in the final page which can be used to support the qualitative assessment of how different groups might be benefited, or to quantify the number of beneficiaries in each group, if you opt to use a quantitative approach.
If your project does not directly benefit any of the target groups, you should ask whether any further thought can be given to the beneficiaries of the project and consider ways to improve it.