Each year, governments spend vast amounts of money addressing social problems such as homelessness. But in most cases, we have no idea how effective this spending is. Performance is rarely assessed, and measurement tends to focus on tracking the number of people served and the amount of service provided rather than the outcomes that are achieved. At the same time, tight budgets cause us to under-invest in prevention, even when we know that doing so will lead to greater expenditures on remediation down the road.

In this session leading American economist Jeff Liebman will argue that an evidence-based-policy movement is needed which combines a focus on rigorous evaluation, with an approach that uses data at a much higher frequency to improve the administration and impact of government-funded homelessness programmes. Join us to learn all about it and ‘real world’ examples of his work in cities like Seattle and Denver, demonstrating how the approach has been applied in practice.