4 Put differently, there are around the same number of FTE volunteers in the UK as there are paid employees in the manufacturing, construction and real estate sectors combined. Indeed, the only industrial sectors with a larger UK workforce are wholesale and retail services, education, health and social work. And it does not end there. It is estimated that another 170 million hours a year are volunteered by people less than once a month. 5 And to this estimate of formal volunteering should be added measures of informal volunteering. According to calculations recently released by the ONS, informal volunteers provide anywhere between 1.7 and 2.1 billion hours of extra help each year. 6 So, all in, volunteering in the UK might amount to as much as 4.4 billion hours per year. That is 1.7 hours per week for every UK adult aged over 16. It is not far off 10% of the total hours worked by all UK paid employees. That is quite an army. 4  Bank and Pro Bono Economics calculations using ONS Household Satellite Account hours. 5  Bank and Pro Bono Economics calculations using ONS Household Satellite Account hours. 6  See http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/about-ons/business-transparency/freedom-of-information/what-can-irequest/published-ad-hoc-data/econ/august-2014/hhsa-consistent-estimates-of-the-value-of-informalvoluntary-activity-in-2012-13.xls for further details. BIS central bankers’ speeches  3  Second, volunteering also appears to be big internationally. A group of academics at John Hopkins University have been pioneers in this field and have published cross-country comparisons. 7 They calculated that, in 2005, around 970m people in the world were engaged in voluntary activity.
So the Oxera team sought to capture the benefits of reducing homelessness in getting young people into employment or training, preventing them from re-offending, treating their mental health issues and reducing their substance misuse. These are a subset, albeit an important subset, of the social costs of homelessness. The results of this study, which was published by PBE last year, are outlined in Figure 12. To cut a long story short, the study suggested that, for every £ spent by Centrepoint, there was a societal benefit of at least £ Or, put differently, Centrepoint delivered a social return on investment of 140% over a five year period. This was very much a lower bound estimate. Let me give you a second example of a PBE social impact study, this time on an even grittier issue – child sexual exploitation. In 2012, a PBE team from the Bank of England did a piece of work for Barnardo’s to judge the impact of their interventions to help exploited children. 26 They looked at the reduced incidence of missing person calls to the police, the reduced probability of becoming classified as Not in Employment, Education or Training (NEET), reductions in substance misuse and the benefits from secure accommodation. These benefits are outlined in Figure 13. They suggest a higher social welfare multiplier, perhaps as large as six to twelve. This is not miles away from estimates from a recent City of London study.