Social value is now embedded in UK public procurement law. The Procurement Act 2023 places a statutory duty on contracting authorities to maximise public benefit. The National Procurement Policy Statement makes clear that social value is how that duty is delivered. Billions of pounds of public contracts are awarded every year with social value as a scored, weighted component of who wins.
And yet the system is not functioning as a market. It is functioning as a series of panicked transactions between parties who don’t understand each other, don’t speak the same language, and have never been given the infrastructure to do this properly.
That is how all new things go. Eventually an economy, a way of doing things is established. Now is that time
What a functioning social value economy would look like
A functioning market has buyers who know what they want, suppliers who know what they’re selling, and a shared language that makes the transaction possible.
The social value economy needs four things to work properly.
- Commissioners who set requirements they can actually evidence. Not vague commitments to community benefit, but specific, measurable outcomes aligned to local need, procured with enough lead time for the supply chain to prepare. They will have checked with the community, and have working relationships with Charities and VCSEs to understand capacity.
- Main contractors who buy social value strategically, not desperately. Not at eleven at night before a bid deadline, but as a planned component of their commercial offer, built into relationships that exist before the tender lands.
- Subcontractors who know their community relationships have commercial value. A subcontractor with established charity partnerships, apprenticeship programmes and local hiring practices is not just doing good work. They are holding assets that a main contractor needs to win. Most subcontractors do not know this. Most main contractors have not told them.
- Charities and VCSEs who operate as confident suppliers. Not grateful recipients of whatever arrives. Organisations with products, prices, and the ability to evidence what they deliver in language a procurement officer can use. The know what due dillegence is and are ready to jump through the necessary hoops
That is the market. In most places, it does not exist yet.
The three-tier supply chain nobody has built
The most underused structure in social value is the subcontractor as connector.
Main contractors win large public contracts. Those contracts require social value. The social value is delivered through communities. The organisations embedded in those communities are charities and VCSEs.
Between the main contractor and the charity sits the subcontractor. An M&E firm, a facilities management company, a construction subcontractor, even a social value consultant. They work on the project. They operate in the community. They already have, or could easily build, relationships with local organisations.
When a subcontractor brings established social value relationships to a main contractor’s bid, they are not just doing the work. They are strengthening the bid. They are making the main contractor more competitive. That is a commercial proposition, not a corporate responsibility gesture.
Most subcontractors are not making this proposition. Most main contractors are not asking for it.
The bootstrap problem nobody is solving
Here is the sharpest dysfunction in the system, and the one least often named.
Charities are being asked to become market-ready. To understand TOMs frameworks. To build evidenced product offerings. To speak the language of procurement. To show up in rooms as suppliers rather than supplicants. They have to pass due dilligence.
That is the right ask. But it requires resource. Time, expertise, and in many cases external support to build the capability. And the people making the ask are not providing the resource to answer it.
Commissioners set the requirements without funding charities to meet them. Main contractors need the social value without paying for the infrastructure that produces it. Funders and grant-makers continue to fund projects and activities rather than the organisational capability that would make those projects sustainable.
The result is a charity sector being told to run faster on a treadmill nobody has plugged in.
This is not a charity problem. It is a system problem, and the system has multiple owners.
- Commissioners need to fund market readiness, not just outcomes. Capacity building grants, pre-procurement engagement, and fair payment for the infrastructure work that makes social value delivery possible.
- Main contractors need to pay properly for social value, not treat it as a charitable contribution. If a charity partnership adds points to your bid and value to your contract, it has a price. Pay it.
- Subcontractors need to invest in their community relationships before the bid, not after. The charity that knows you before the contract is worth more than the one you find on Google at the deadline.
- Funders and grant-makers need to recognise that funding a charity to build its social value offer is not mission drift. It is the most sustainable thing they could do. A charity with a contract that renews does not need a grant next year.
- And charities themselves need to make the shift. Not because the system is fair, but because waiting for it to become fair is not a strategy.
The vision
A functioning social value economy is not complicated in theory.
Charities build products. Subcontractors package them into their commercial offer. Main contractors buy them strategically. Commissioners get outcomes they can evidence. Communities receive investment that is planned, sustained, and accountable.
The loop closes. The charity knows what the company needs. The company knows what the charity delivers. The commissioner can point to outcomes that are real, not reported. The community benefits from investment that compounds rather than arrives in lumps and disappears.
That market is achievable. The legal framework for it exists. The need for it is demonstrable. The raw material, in the form of charities doing extraordinary work in communities across the country, is already there.
What is missing is the will, across every tier of the system, to build the infrastructure that connects them properly.
Underpin Consultants works across all four tiers of this market. With charities building their social value offer. With contractors developing their supply chain proposition. With commissioners designing requirements that the market can actually meet.
The social value economy will not build itself. Let’s build it together.
