Richard has been working in outcomes contracting for over 20 years.
For 12 years, he set up and ran for-profit organisations delivering outcomes contracts, mainly tackling long-term unemployment and mostly based in the UK. The last contract he led was worth £750m, with frontline delivery by a network of 75 local subcontractors. He was Specialist Adviser to the UK government’s Work and Pensions Select Committee during their enquiry into the Work Programme.
For the last 10 years, he has been working as an independent consultant, driving the performance of outcomes contracts, and challenging donors and global institutions on how to connect spend better with impact – through optimising contracting and performance management.
He is currently the Chair of six Social Impact Bonds in the UK, covering homelessness prevention, care for carers and refugee settlement. Four previous SIBs, successfully completed now, also included reducing school exclusion. He is Chair of a Development Impact Bond in Palestine, linking young adults with employment.
He is also a Senior Advisor for the Global Fund (HIV, TB and malaria). Richard has just mobilised projects in six countries: introducing new outcomes contracts (e.g. to increase the testing and treatment of malaria in rural Nigeria); transitioning grants to performance-based contracts (e.g. to improve the efficiency of malaria net distribution in South Sudan, and increase TB testing and reporting in the Philippines), and; establishing new performance management systems (e.g. to improve HIV treatment uptake and completion in Niger).
He additionally works as a Senior Consultant for the World Bank, until the summer of 2021 supporting the Ministry of Public Health in Afghanistan with the management of contracted health services in which service provider payments were tied to the delivery of key health interventions. Other Bank projects, across a number of countries, have included: developing self-financing labour migration systems in Afghanistan; linking refugees with jobs in Ethiopia, and; designing and mobilising outcomes-based job intermediation in Saudi Arabia.
Richard had an early career in international education. He studied Philosophy and Psychology at Oxford and Applied Linguistics at Exeter.