Handyperson benefits toolkit presentation at Sector meeting

1. National Body for Home Improvement Agencies
Improving Delivery of the Disabled Facilities Grant
Handyperson
Benefits
Realisation Toolkit
February 2019

2. What we’ll cover….
• Where the HPBRT came from?
• Methodology behind the toolkit?
• How was it used?
• Can it still be used today?

3. Where the HPBRT Came From…
• Formed part of the 2011 CLG national review of handyperson
services.
• At a time when HP services were the flavour of the month,
and hoped to prove a return on investment for
commissioners.
• An Excel Spreadsheet containing complex formulae and
macros, developed by Cassiopeia.
• 70 page “short” user guide!

4. Methodology behind the toolkit
• Developers gathered retrospective data/literature review from
various sources on areas such as falls, excess cold, home
security, hospital discharge and domestic fires.
• The data was then aggregated into a percentage distribution
based on 100,000 head of population…..
• So we could extrapolate for every 100,000 head of population
we would expect to see “x” number of falls, “x” number of
domestic fires, etc.
• A notional “cost” was placed on each such incidence, with the
assumption that by preventing and incidence, that cost would
be saved.

5. Important Distinction:
Costed Benefits not Cost Savings
• Developers stress that the attributed savings are not strictly
financial, and as such they use the term “costed-benefit”.
• For example, preventing one domestic fire, would not only
save a person/s from injury or death, but would also save a
staggering amount of money….But… You still have to pay to
maintain an infrastructure around fire prevention/fighting and
so the cost saving is not straight forward!
• That said, the toolkit is considered “robust”, and the data
produced is considered such both by HM Treasury and the
NHS / DoH.

6. How was the toolkit used?
• Some HP service managers used the tool to successfully
broker a funding dialogue with commissioners.
• Others looked on it less favourably, especially as the RoI
values were often so conservative, so as to return a negative
value on investment. (This is often very normal, and not to be
feared)!
• One LA “reverse-engineered” the system by starting with the
amount of costed benefits they wanted to achieve, and used
the tool to model the size of service required to deliver those
benefits.

7. Can it still be used today?
• Formulae last updated in 2017/18…..not much changed!
• Don’t get hung up on the guidance….It’s more complicated
than it needs to be. You can do a reasonably accurate
analysis of your own service relatively quickly.
• Don’t be down-hearted if you return a negative value – this is
very common. It’s important to contextualise (and explain to
commissioners) that the benefits measured are over a single
year, but it is fair to argue that some measures (e.g. fitting
handrails) go on delivering benefits for years after fitting, so
the impact is cumulative!

8. What you need for an analysis..?
• You need just four items of information:
• Capital expenditure
• Operational expenditure
• Number of visits per household in last 12 months
• The number of “jobs” and “job types” completed over 12 months
Note: This is purely for the provision of handyperson works, not other
HIA type activity.

9. Capital/Operational Expenditure
• You need to know how much your service costs to run in
terms of capital expenditure and operating expenditure.
• The “Service Costs” tab in the toolkit will help you calculate
this.
Note: This is purely for the provision of handyperson works, not other
HIA type activity.

10. Visits & Households
• You need to know the number of “visits” per household you
have conducted over the previous 12 months.
Note: It is most likely that the number of visits will be higher than the
number of households. If you can’t work this out, just use the default
national average which is 1.5 visits per household.

11. Jobs and Job types
• The number of completed “jobs” your service has completed over
the previous 12 months, roughly grouped into the following
categories:
• Small repairs
• Home security Improvements
• Minor adaptations
• Hospital Discharge
• Energy Efficiency Improvements
• Fire Safety Improvements
Note: You can either use your own distribution, or let the system divide a
total number of jobs into the most commonly found distribution.

16. Roy McNally
Development Manager
roym@foundations.uk.com
@McnallyRoy