No Interest Loan Scheme Pilot Evaluation and other financial inclusion project evaluation support

The procurement documents will be available on Friday 29th July (or early w/c 1 August, subject to sign off).

Fair4All Finance is looking to appoint a provider (or a prime contractor with consortium partners - i.e. two or more organisations working together) to deliver a process and impact evaluation of the core No Interest Loan Scheme (NILS) pilot which is aimed at supporting people in vulnerable circumstances who are financially excluded or underserved- please refer to the additional information pack for background which can be obtained from Georgia Kewley at email address: georgia@fair4allfinance.org.uk There may also be additional budget available to cover a subsequent evaluation of the ramping up of scale for NILS and the piloting of other products in response to the cost of living crisis, and /or additional evaluations required for other unrelated Fair4All Finance programmes and so we are also seeking some flexibility during this procurement to commission additional work through the appointed partner(s) in a framework type model. The budget range for this tender could therefore be between £200k to £880k.

Our experience would suggest that delivering the three core NILS core pilot evaluation components (1. Process, 2. Social impact & 3. Economic impact including the cost / benefit analysis of distinct delivery models) will require a wide range of experience and expertise, and therefore that a consortium approach may be the most likely outcome of this tender.

We envisage that the three evaluation components will collate into an overall assessment of the effectiveness of the NILS delivery. This assessment will balance the cost and efficiency elements - per the process evaluation - with the social impact and economic impact elements, to assess the overall viability of the no-interest loan construct.

Our core hypothesis is that the positive impact exceeds the cost element; we would like the overall evaluation to robustly test this.

The evaluations should also assess whether NILS works for, and what its value and impacts are on the key audiences: the borrowers (people in vulnerable circumstances some of whom are underserved or financially excluded, lenders (community lenders including Credit Unions and Community Development Finance Institutions (CDFIs) as well as commercial lenders, funders (including HMT, devolved administrations and JP Morgan), referral partners (including local authorities and Housing Associations) and wider society.

We are open to providers proposing the methodology they plan to use to meet the aims and objectives of this work, but we anticipate that it will comprise the following principles:

Continued under 11.2.4