magine signing off a building on a rough sketch, a pinky promise, or a good feeling.
I assume you’d want the specification. What it’s made of, what it can hold, who’s laying the foundations and what they’ve built before. You’d also want to make sure it’s up to standard, that people have the right idea and the right credentials. You’d score all of that against the other bids, and only then would you let the money move.
Every ‘serious’ part of a tender works this way. Then you reach the social value section, and the rules flip.
Here, a promise counts as evidence. “We’re committed to supporting local communities.” “We’ll create opportunities for people furthest from work.” Lovely. Scored, banked, and in a great many cases never looked at again. It’s the one part of the tender where you’re allowed to describe the building you feel like building, rather than the one you’ll actually put up. Oh and no one will check properly whether I did it.
Score the plan
If I ruled the world, social value would be specified like everything else.
Tell me what you’re going to do. Tell me who you’re going to do it with, and whether they’ve done it before. Tell me the story behind it, because a real plan has one and an invented one doesn’t. Then let me score that before award, write it into the contract, and check it against what actually happened. Not the sentiment. The plan.
I’ll put one belief on the table plainly while I’m here. Delivery through organisations already embedded in a place should score higher than delivery bolted onto a big supplier’s internal team. Proximity to need beats headcount. If you’re serious about outcomes, you reward the people who were there before the contract and will be there after it. Oh and while I am doing crazy dream ideas, weight by deprivation. Focus social value on the places that most need it by incentivising collaboration with the people changing the world in the hardest hit places.
None of this removes flexibility. Partners fold, circumstances change, and a good contract lets the commitment move as long as the value moves with it. What it removes is the free pass.
Now, I know what you’re thinking, we do this already. Yes, but consistently? To the same level? And in a way that works for small and medium businesses? I don’t believe so.
The catch
There’s a problem with everything I’ve just asked for, and it’s mine to deal with.
A harder score only produces better social value if it measures what people are going to do. Right now it measures who can write and SMEs have no one dedicated to this.
You can’t fairly score a plan when one bidder has a team who writes plans for a living and the other has a founder doing it at midnight. That’s not a difference in what they’ll deliver. It’s a difference in who’s been taught the language.
And be careful here, because this is where people get it wrong. Small and medium businesses are not behind at social value. Plenty of them do more real good per pound than a PLC with a forty-person team, because they employ local people, they sponsor the under-11s, and they’ve been part of the place for thirty years. What they’re behind at is evidencing it in the format we invented and never taught anyone to use.
So if I’m going to mark you harder, you have a right to know what’s being marked.
That means doing something I have almost never seen. Help SMEs understand social value. Have online resources, highlight quality needs and even have in person events where social value is explained. I’ve been to Match my Project events where charities and business come together, and the issue with those is that people need to know social value exists and matters before they understand they even need to enter the room.
And the answer to a knowledge gap is to close it. Asking less of small firms just leaves them exactly where they are, permanently, with a lower ceiling and a good excuse. That’s not kindness. What we have now is a tiered knowledge system we built by accident.
Confession: this isn’t a new idea. The Procurement Act already tells contracting authorities to have regard to the barriers small and medium businesses face, and to consider whether those barriers can be removed. So the teaching I’m asking for isn’t a legal risk. It’s a duty that already exists. The catch is that this particular duty can’t be enforced in the courts. Nothing happens to the authority that ignores it. It’s a duty with no consequence.
Spend at the beginning, not the end
It’s no more work to run a tender this way. But the effort just moves. At the moment we spend it after the failure, writing reports about why the thing didn’t happen. This spends it before the award, making sure it will. I know which I’d rather pay for.
Where the ideal meets the real
Now the part I’m going to say before someone says it to me.
I’ve been using “equal footing” fairly loosely, so let me be straight about it. Equal treatment, in procurement law, means treating bidders equally inside the tender. It’s never promised that they arrive equally equipped, and it shouldn’t. Bidders differ. That’s competition. What I’m arguing for isn’t a legal principle I can point at. It’s a design choice, and it needs defending as one.
The first is proportionality. Evaluation criteria have to be proportionate and tied to what’s being bought. Score a partner’s backstory in fine detail on a modest contract and you’ve built something a losing bidder can challenge, fairly.
The second is equal treatment proper. Openly marking a supplier up for being “local” discriminates against the bidder from two counties over, and that’s been found problematic more than once. Preferring the postcode is not a strategy. It’s a legal risk. The lawful version is narrower and better: you don’t score the supplier’s postcode, you score the outcomes for the community the contract is meant to serve, and you let anyone, from anywhere, show how they’ll deliver them. Equal treatment also sets the shape of the teaching. You can’t hand one bidder something the others don’t get. So the education has to be open, published, and available to everyone, before the procurement starts. And somebody has to pay for it. Nobody has allocated that money either, but they can, so they should.
This episode’s open question
Whose job is it to close the gap?
When you don’t have a social value manager in house, and almost no small business does, is it the business’s job to go and become an expert on its own time? If commissioners, society and the law are the ones asking for this, does the asking come with a duty to teach?
I lean towards the second, and I’m aware that’s convenient for a man who explains social value for a living, and would rightly want to be paid for it. So tell me where you’d put it.
You wouldn’t take “trust me on the foundations” from a builder, so I’d stop taking similar words on social value. I wouldn’t hand someone the specification in a language nobody ever taught them to read, and then call the silence a lack of commitment.
I’ll read every answer. In the final episode, they get their say.
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 here.
You can read previous episodes here.
