Our working paper, “The UK’s Green Gilt: Demonstrating the Contribution to Jobs and Levelling Up”, co-authored with the LSE’s Grantham Research Institute, outlines how the commitments to reporting on social co-benefits included in the UK government’s recently published Green Financing Framework can be implemented in a practical, efficient and innovative way.
The main recommendations from the paper include:
- The government should adopt from the outset well-established social value indicators at the project level, as well as one or two nationwide indicators. In the context of the post-pandemic economic recovery and in line with the Green Financing Framework, we believe that decent job creation is the most appropriate category of social outcome and will resonate strongly with the public.
- How to maximise the social co-benefits of the green gilt programme, based on extensive market engagement and analysis. This includes the consideration of social co-benefits from the outset and the need for nationwide metrics.
- How the UK’s Green Financing Framework, jobs goals and levelling up agenda can be connected to the Social Bond Principles (SBP) framework. This could involve the adoption of well-established indicators, including the Social Value Portal’s critical Themes, core Outcomes and key Measures (TOMs).
- How the TOMs and other indicators could be applied to the UK’s green gilt by mapping the Green Financing Framework’s indicators to the SBP framework – focusing on benefits (jobs and skills) and target populations (underperforming regions and disadvantaged populations). We also suggest additional indicators for potential development in the future.
Next steps:
The paper recommends three key next steps, including launching collaborative research to understand the place-based dimensions of the social co-benefits, and the UK development of a social taxonomy framework.
Background:
The Impact Investing Institute is a member of and acts as Secretariat for the UK Treasury and Debt Management Office’s new Stakeholder Discussion Forum on green finance. This builds on the Green+ Gilt proposal which we published with the Green Finance Institute and the LSE’s Grantham Research Institute last year, which emphasised the potential of a green sovereign bond with well-defined social and economic benefits.