The first episode of ‘Building social value from scratch: seven pieces, one question. If you were designing a social value system from a blank page, how would you do it right?’
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A few weeks ago I spoke at the Institute of Social Value Convention at ExCeL in London. An amazing group of professionals: positive, serious about the work.
In the weeks since, I have had twenty or so conversations about social value. One thing is now clear to me.
Social value does amazing work, but is inconsistent. In quality, in capability, and even in its very definition.
Different levels of government have different requirements. Councils covering the same ground run different systems. One business has a forty-person social value team; another has never heard of the term, and both are bidding for the same contract. Charities and delivery organisations do not yet fully know what they need to do, how to do it, or what the benefit is to them and the people they serve.
And the public, the people all of this is for? Most have no idea social value exists.
Nobody designed this
The UK’s social value system was never designed. It has grown with no real guidance from the very top.
Law on top of guidance on top of habit. An Act here, yes. A policy note there, a measurement framework bolted on, a portal to feed, a local interpretation of a national interpretation of a duty. Every authority reading it slightly differently, because every authority is allowed to.
None of this happened because anyone was foolish. It happened the way public systems usually happen: one reasonable decision at a time, each made inside the constraints of its moment, none of them made properly.
The result is that knowing what is actually settled, what is law, what is guidance and what is merely custom, has become a job in itself. I know, because it is partly my job. I am telling you it should not need to exist.
Twenty years of research and development
Twenty years of trial and error is not a failed system. It is the research and development phase, and the findings are free. Every framework that measured the wrong thing, a commitment that quietly evaporated after contract award, every small business that met social value for the first time on the biggest bid of its year and lost: each one is a finding. Documented, replicated, tested in the hardest conditions available.
Whoever builds next gets all of it for nothing.
Unfinished is not the same as failed.
If I ruled the world
So rather than just pointing at the problem, I want to have a crack at building something. For now, as a dream: a better and more positive social value system. One that works like an economy rather than a compliance exercise. One that focuses on people and outcomes rather than numbered targets.
The thought experiment goes like this. Suppose you had the rarest thing in public policy: a blank page. No legacy systems, no inherited habits, no political constraints. You are building a social value system from scratch, and your only brief is to do it right.
Almost nobody ever gets that page. The experiment is still worth running, because it separates what social value is from how we happen to do it. Those two things have been confused for a long time.
Over the coming months I am going to run the experiment in public, one design decision at a time.
I would build an economy, not a gold rush. A market with buyers who know what they are buying, suppliers who know what they are selling, and the institutions that make trade honest. I would score the plan, not the promise. Social value specified, evidenced and contracted before award, like every other part of a tender. I would have no thresholds. Every contract carries social value, scaled to its size, because the habit matters more than the amount. I would put philosophy before efficiency. Decide what the thing is for before reaching for the dashboard that counts it. And I would design the whole system against a Blackstone. Not the thing you want to become, the thing you refuse to.
The rules of the game
Each episode will do three things, in the same order, every time.
First, the ideal. The design decision I would make if I ruled the world, stated with full conviction. No hedging, no “it depends”. You will know exactly what I think.
Second, the stress point. The place where my ideal strains against reality: actual legislation, actual budgets, actual human behaviour. I will name it before anyone in the comments can. Not as a caveat, as content.
Third, an open question. A real one, not engagement bait: the specific tension I have not resolved, handed to you. I will read every answer. In the final episode I will report back on them, and on where they changed my mind.
Because the point of all this is to promote debate. I am not the king of good ideas. I want to speak with and work with others across the industry, to educate and be educated on the way through. I would rather be corrected in public than unchallenged in private.
Where the ideal meets the real
Let’s be honest.
The blank page is a fantasy. Even a builder starting from nothing inherits procurement regulations, trade agreements, spending rules, political weather and a finite amount of money. Nobody builds in a vacuum, and anyone selling you the vacuum version is selling you aesthetics.
So the ideal world in these pieces is a thinking tool, not a plan. Its job is to show what the system is trying to be, so that every compromise made in the real one is made knowingly, priced honestly, and revisited when the constraint that forced it moves.
A designed system is no purer than one that grows in small isolation.
It just knows why it looks the way it does.
That room at ExCeL was full of people who want this to work. The twenty conversations since told me the same thing in twenty different ways. What none of us has yet is a shared picture of what better looks like.
This episode’s open question. If you could change one design decision in how your organisation or authority does social value, and only one, what would it be? I will collect the answers. In the final episode, they get their say.
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Lewis English is the founder of Underpin Consultants, working on social value, strategy and stakeholder engagement across the UK. If any of this is sitting on your desk, you can book a free 30 minute conversation at underpinconsultants.com.
