New rules came out this month.
What I’d like to make clear is this – social value is both a thing that happens in society, and a thing that happens in government.
When we talk about whether social value is worth doing, it’s because we are talking about the government and business side, not the benefit to human society thing.
Social Value (with capitals) is government compliance and only done by organisations because it makes them money through government contracts. It wins contracts you’d otherwise lose on price, keeps people who’d otherwise leave, and gets you into supply chains that were shut.
This is Social Value (Capitals). The companies with proper social value (lower case) want to make a difference, to give back, because they see the benefit to their staff, their communities and the planet. Other teams aren’t doing it out of that goodness they’re doing it because it pays. I think both have their place.
The above is a strong statement and many will, and have, disagreed. I work with both interpretations of Social Value/social value because they’re both growth opportunities for businesses, because compliance and strategy are part of a business consultant’s job. Which one do I prefer – the one that helps the most people.
And how will I tell the difference between companies following Social Value or social value? The ones who are focused on compliance will rightly shift all their efforts into jobs, because they’ve been told to.
Compliance gets you what is asked, inside the contract window, and it stops the day the requirement stops. Don’t blame anyone for complying. Don’t blame anyone for delivering more.
Most of this doesn’t apply to you anyway, but it will affect you
PPN 026 covers central government departments, their agencies and their arm’s length bodies, on contracts of £1m and above, for procurements starting on or after 1 January 2027.
Your council isn’t in it. Your NHS trust isn’t in it. Your housing association, your school, your university, your police force, none of them, unless they decide to be. And nothing under a million is in it anywhere. But it’s showing the way.
Public procurement is around £395 billion a year, about a third of everything the public sector spends. The new model governs a slice of that, and it’s the slice already staffed by people whose job title is social value.
If you’re waiting to be told, you’ll be waiting on most of the work you’ll ever bid for. Social value is a movement, not a set of rules. The rules arrive afterwards and tidy up what people were already doing.
What they say
Weighting of at least 10% between £1m and £5m, 20% above. The old model’s eight outcomes are cut to two, good jobs and skills, losing supply chains, sustainability, crime and wellbeing on the way. Above £5m you set a social value KPI, published and reported yearly, and what you delivered counts when you bid for the next one.
I like more of that than I expected to. But rather than mark it against my own opinion, I’m marking it against four other people’s.
The four I’m marking it against
At the end of episode one I asked what single design decision you’d change, if you could only change one.
Emma Thornton PISEP, MISV would “stop treating social value as a bid requirement and start treating it as an operational discipline”. Jessica Mellor-Clark would design delivery “so the outcomes continue to deliver a positive impact long after the end of any contract”, and reward organisations for picking up what another one started. Penny Anderson would insist every decision is made with long term aims in mind, because the meaningful thing is usually laying foundations and the outputs come later. Andy Smith would require commitments to state long-term outcomes rather than short-term outputs.
Nobody said measurement. Nobody said thresholds. Nobody said money. Four people who do this for a living, given one wish each, all spent it on time.
What the model does with that
Not very much, and I think the biggest issue. Four experienced people independently asked for one thing the current information address what they ask for, legacy, with a different word – jobs.
I don’t think that blunt response was what people meant.
Where it says I’m wrong
In episode four I argued against thresholds, because a threshold doesn’t go easy on small spending, it lets it off. This one sits at £1m, right where smaller organisations compete. Below it, the argument hasn’t been lost. It hasn’t been had.
In episode six I argued that charities and VCSEs are the natural deliverers of social value, and should be sourced first rather than remembered a fortnight before mobilisation. The old model had a supply chain outcome. This one doesn’t. As Social Enterprise UK put it, a contractor could hit the full 20% through direct hiring alone, with no obligation to touch its supply chain. I get paid to help charities into that supply chain, so read that knowing it.
None of which is an argument against contractors. The ones doing this well embed social value into delivery rather than into bids, and the ones I’ve watched up close do it because it wins the next job, not because a policy note arrived.
So is it any good?
A lot of people have stated whether the new rules are good, bad, or ugly. I think what the rules massively identify is that good social value isn’t the same as effective Social Value. Thresholds, and, job targets, and skills are compliance, and the government has chosen to try and solve problem of jobs. Legacy, in their eyes, comes from jobs. Everything else isn’t an argument in this debate.
And whichever way the upcoming guidance goes, it settles nothing for most people. Good should happen, and businesses should be part of it. Nobody is going to score you. You’ll do it because it wins you work, or you won’t.
Almost nobody gets a blank page. I said that in episode one and it’s still true.
Somebody, somewhere, is going to get one.
I hope they read the comments.
