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The research presents an impact study of Construction Youth Trust’s and Network Rail’s Budding Brunels Rail programme which aims to introduce young people facing barriers to careers within the construction professions. The aim was to develop complex and robust Social Return on Investment (SROI) measures which would work alongside more simplistic outcome-based binary measures preferred by government e.g. employed/unemployed. There are challenges developing a sufficiently robust SROI study particularly as there is not currently a theory of valuation of non-market goods to value outcomes in social science. Stakeholders were consulted to determine the changes that had happened for them as a result of the intervention and then a financial value was put on the changes. Both students and construction industry professionals consulted indicated they benefited from the programme. The research demonstrates while there are increasing arguments for the standardisation of SROI it would have not been possible to measure the impact of Budding Brunels without the flexibility of the approach.

The challenges measuring social value is not a new concept for the construction industry which is good at measuring costs, timings and efficiency of projects but not the benefits of intangibles such as good design even though design can promote everything from reduced crime to higher productivity (Macmillan, 2005). The measurement of social value has become increasingly important through the enactment of the Social Value Act 2012 requiring public authorities to consider economic, social and environmental well-being when awarding public sector contracts. Social Return on Investment (SROI) is an approach that can be used to measure the social, economic and environmental benefits of an activity by dividing the value of outcomes for stakeholders, by the inputs of the activity leading to the SROI ratio. The research reports on a project at Construction Youth Trust to develop a bespoke Social Return on Investment (SROI) model to capture the value of activities helping young people facing barriers access opportunities within the construction industry. The research examines the primary and secondary research that went into the development of the Trusts bespoke SROI model that was developed in partnership with the construction industry and part funded by construction company Willmott Dixon. Initial conclusions are that SROI is still under development and there are a lot of technical challenges to implementing the approach such as a lack of universal bank of financial proxies and the inability to compare SROI reports. Therefore implementing SROI is currently a time consuming and expensive process.