The phone went at about nine in the evening.
A company I had never worked with, bidding for a contract worth more than my house. They had done everything. The technical response, the pricing, the case studies, the method statement. Everything except the social value section. Could I write something by the morning?
I told them very clearly that this was a terrible way to do business, I couldn’t write this one, but I’d help them write the next. Why?
Because not one word of what I would have wrote would have ever happened. Nobody in that building had thought about social value until the night before the deadline, and nobody was going to think about it again until the next bid landed.
I want to be fair to them. They were not cynical. They were decent people doing what the system rewarded, which was to treat social value as the last box on the form. The fault isn’t all in that phone call. It’s in the market
What a market actually is
A market is a place, physical or not, where buyers and sellers meet to exchange something of value at a price they both accept. It only works when both sides share enough, a common language, trust that what’s promised is what’s delivered, and a consequence when it isn’t, to tell a fair deal from a bad one.i
We talk about a social value “market” as if one exists. It mostly doesn’t.
But a modern, working market is not just buyers and sellers. It is the boring machinery underneath too.
- Buyers should know what good looks like, so they can tell it from a nightmare disguised as a promise.
- Sellers should know what they are actually offering, and can price it.
- There should be a shared language, so that a word means the same thing on both sides of the table.
- Someone should set the rules for the market, and enforce them.
- When it comes to public money, there has to be a commissioner, someone who says this public money needs to do public good in this public way.
- There should be people setting frameworks so things are done properly, with care, and giving equal opportunity
- Somebody independent has to check that what was sold was delivered.
- Well recognised, and understandable consequences should be available if something isn’t achieved.
It sounds complicated, and it is, but if you take any of the above away and you do not have a market. You have a gold rush. No rules, people setting things up where they like, digging holes, exploiting the land, and the people, and at the end you have some rich people and a hole in a hill everyone else has to deal with.
It’s not missing, it has missing parts
Social value has a lot of this already but each one is missing key parts, and one thing that’s definitely missing is a standard framework for everyone.
There is no common language, so one area does one thing and another, another. A “local job” means twelve months of real employment to one authority and a two-week placement to another. There is very little independent checking, so suppliers mark their own homework and are surprised when the marks are high. And the cynic in me says some metrics are designed to be easy achieve so the metric is valued, not the actual good. And there is almost no consequence for failing, because the promise was scored before the work started and nobody went back to look.
In the week Episode 1 went out, the people who do this for a living said the same thing back to me in different words: social value that is bound to a bid dies with the bid. Bids are written to win, not to last. If you design a market where the commitment is checked now, and in the future, where it is owned by the people delivering the contract and not by one specialist writing the answer at nine at night, and the conversation moves from promises to what actually happened.
None of this is expensive
Here’s a positive. Building the machinery is cheap next to the money already moving through public contracts, and some people are already doing it. Nothing I am saying is new – it’s just not standard, at least, I hope, not yet.
- An agreed measurement language that states “we will focus on the social value and not the measurement.” Why? because the below bullet point exists too.
- An independent checking of social value by a small body, or a role, funded from a fraction of the value it protects. Not part of someone’s job, not living in procurement. And it generates good news, and lessons. For the council, for the charity, for the business. That way everyone is learning – rather than everything being in isolation.
- Then educate buyers, and sellers by finishing the training that already half exists. An extreme version of this is a funded “social value licence” where you can’t bid until you’ve done a 10 minute training course on what will be expected.
This is design work, not a spending programme. The money is flowing past the problems that create misunderstanding, over-reliance on measurement and a lack of focus on legacy. The Procurement Act gave us the thinnest of foundations and none of the funds. The public benefit duty is the right idea, written into law (sort of). What sits on top of it, the language and the checking and the consequences, has not been built yet. But it can be.
And when it is started, the reward changes shape. A charity that delivers something good stops being a line in a bid that expires on handover, and becomes a supplier with a track record and a contract that renews. The donkey sanctuary gets to plan past March. The measuring no longer stops once the contract does.
The mantra shouldn’t be “Social value is good, how do we measure it.” It should be “social value is good, how do we do more of it.”
Where the ideal meets the real
So here is the wall.
Who pays for the machinery? An ombudsman, a checking body, the training for buyers, all of it costs money, and no minister has stood at a podium to allocate it. The Act created a duty without a budget or really a responsibility, and this is the same problem wearing a different coat. In my perfect world, a thin slice comes off the top of contract value and pays for the infrastructure that makes the other contracts honest.
In this world, that thin slice is somebody’s political fight, and I won’t pretend I know who wins it.
This episode’s open question
Would you give up a small share of every contract’s social value to pay for independently checking the rest?
I lean yes. A market that cannot tell a kept promise from a broken one is not a market, and checking is what buys the difference. But it is a real trade, real money off the top, and I have watched people I respect land firmly on the other side of it.
So I am asking. Where would you draw that line, and what would you want in return for the slice you gave up?
I will 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
