Picture the least interesting contract a council could possibly sign. Toilet roll. A bin order. Uniforms for the leisure centre.
Nobody writes a case study about bins, do they? And nobody thinks of social value when it comes to bins, either. The job’s too small, and it sits under some threshold. It’s a purchase, not a commission.
Social Value Thresholds are Bunk
I understand why the thresholds are there. You don’t want to bury a two-man firm in paperwork to win a job worth a fortnight of their time. You don’t want the admin costing more than the thing you’re buying. A threshold is kind for the smaller firms.
A threshold doesn’t just go easy on small spending. It lets it off. Below the line, public money isn’t asked to do any public good at all, and we’ve decided that’s fine. Millions, probably billions, of pounds a year, spent well enough, just buying the thing, and nothing else.
Small doesn’t mean empty
I don’t think small has to mean empty. The next bit might divide, but this series is about provoking proper discussion, so here goes.
Take those uniforms, or those bins. Both under the threshold for social value. But something small, something local could be delivered that changes someone’s life. Could it sort out the kids who never come to the free swim sessions because they haven’t got the right thing to wear and won’t say so? Could a local homeless shelter keep things tidier with some new bins, and some cleaning equipment? It’s just a donation, sure. But TOMs and others, rightly or wrongly, allow donations as social value. It’s what these contractors do, and yes it’s small, and yes it’s hard to measure in the moment. But think of the legacy.
Same money. Same contract. One version buys polo shirts, the other buys polo shirts and someone’s life being a bit better. And the firm that did it has now done social value once, on purpose, and found out it wasn’t the nightmare they’d been told it was.
Intention is more important than outcomes in the moment, because intention grows with the next contract.
Ask everyone for something
Let me be fair to the thresholds for a second, because I’m not asking for madness, I am trying to prove a point. A five grand order shouldn’t carry the same weight as a five million pound one. That would be daft, and it would land straight on the small firms I spent last episode defending.
The trick isn’t asking everyone for the same thing. It’s asking everyone for something. A little contract gets a little ask, the thing that lasts longer than the invoice. Point the effort at the places where the need is worst. It’s the asking that becomes the habit, and the habit is what I’m after. Size doesn’t matter.
Where the ideal meets the real
I know what you’re thinking. Last episode I wrote that you mark the plan not the promise, so how can intention be more important than the outcome?
Well, a small company still needs a plan, but it can be small. And if everyone has to be thinking about social value, just a little bit, you remove the inequality of contracts and they build their social value proof quicker. This also works for charities.
And now the wall, because there’s always a wall.
The law doesn’t agree with me. The Procurement Act keeps the small stuff light on purpose, and the whole direction of travel is to make life easier for small suppliers, not harder. A commissioner who slapped a social value score on every bin order would be picking a fight about proportionality, and they’d lose it, and they’d probably deserve to.
So here’s where I actually stand. Not zero. In the dream the line’s gone, of course it is. In the real world the fight worth having is to drag the line right down and keep the ask sensible the whole way, so a small contract carries a small duty instead of none. The purist version of this can exist, but it also can’t. I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
But I’m not going to pretend the line costs us nothing where it sits, either.
This episode’s open question
What’s the smallest contract you’ve ever seen do real social good?
The one that shouldn’t have counted for anything and somehow did. I reckon that number is a lot lower than most commissioners would guess. Every example somebody can name is proof the exemption was always a choice.
So tell me the smallest one you’ve watched work, and what it did.
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.
