Client: Westminster City Council
Project: Soho Angels & Soho NightHub Evaluation
What were MAKE asked to do?
Westminster City Council and a range of partners including the LGBT Foundation and St John’s Ambulance came together to build a highly sophisticated response to the problem of vulnerability in Soho’s night-time economy. The scheme combines a fully kitted out pop-up medical facility in a church at the heart of one of the world’s great nightlife districts with medical professionals and a highly trained set of volunteers (Angels). The latter patrol the area’s streets after dark to identify and support those who are vulnerable, may have had too much to drink, are injured or who are lost. In our view it is the leading model of this kind of intervention.
MAKE was asked by Westminster City Council to examine what the benefits were, how it could be improved and any savings to the public purse.
How did MAKE do it?
We undertook night-time observation sessions with the Soho Angels over several nights throughout the scheme’s 2018 pilots and 2019 when the service was fully operational.
We reviewed the literature. Other than our own national safe space study there was very little evaluation of existing safe space scheme at the time, but as this project progressed research from Professor Simon Moore and his team produced useful data on a sample of other services that provided additional insight into the effectiveness of such schemes and the limitations of the data out there.
We set baselines in terms of NHS admissions, ambulance call-outs and crime so that as the scheme progressed we would be able to evaluate its impact against these key metrics.
We undertook GIS analysis of crime and disorder, noise and hotspot mapping.
We reviewed the thousands of interventions that the Soho Angels had undertaken to identify where they may have prevented ambulance call outs, conveyances and emergency department presentations and admissions.
What happened next?
Westminster is using our research to improve the existing service, celebrate the impact of the scheme (and its amazing volunteers) and to support ongoing lobbying to retain funding and expand the scheme.
What unique value did MAKE bring to this project?
Because MAKE undertook the national evaluation of safe spaces, we have unparalleled expertise the planning, management, governance and operation of these schemes, as well as the use of public sector data sets that allows us to measure their impact on the NHS, police and community.