Social value software - from commitment to delivery.

What social value actually means in procurement

Social value is the additional benefit an organisation delivers to the community, economy and environment through the way it performs a contract, over and above the goods, services or works being bought. It is not charitable giving, and it is not corporate social responsibility reported at group level. It is contract specific: the jobs created on this contract, the apprenticeships delivered in this area, the carbon reduced in this delivery model, the local supply chain spend attributable to this work.

That distinction is where most bids and most evaluations go wrong. A supplier submits a national sustainability report and expects credit. A buyer accepts a general commitment to being a responsible employer and then finds there is nothing measurable to manage. The commitments that survive contact with delivery are always narrow, quantified, geographically anchored and owned by a named person on the contract.

The legal foundation predates the current Act. The Public Services (Social Value) Act 2012 required commissioners of services to consider how procurement might improve economic, social and environmental wellbeing. What has changed since is the machinery around it: national policy expectations, a common measurement vocabulary, and a procurement regime that expects buyers to be explicit about what they are scoring and to be able to show it afterwards.

The policy context under the Procurement Act 2023

The Act requires contracting authorities to have regard to the National Procurement Policy Statement, which sets government priorities that buyers must take into account when designing procurements. In practice this means social, economic and environmental objectives are expected to be visible in the design of a competition rather than bolted on. The Act also strengthens the through life obligations: assessment summaries, contract details, KPI publication and performance notices all make what was promised more traceable.

Award on the most advantageous tender rather than the most economically advantageous tender is a deliberate signal. It gives buyers latitude to weight quality and wider benefit, provided the criteria are published, relate to the subject matter of the contract, and are applied as stated. Buyers cannot invent a social value weighting after tenders are received, and they cannot score commitments they never asked for.

Procurement Policy Notes remain the operational layer. They set expectations on matters such as carbon reduction plans for larger contracts, payment performance, cyber standards, and the use of social value in central government. Different parts of the public sector apply these differently, and devolved administrations have their own frameworks, notably the wellbeing and sustainable procurement duties that apply in Wales and the community benefit expectations in Scotland. Our Procurement Library sets out the current guidance and Notes in one place.

TOMs, frameworks and the measurement problem

The National TOMs framework, standing for Themes, Outcomes and Measures, is the most widely used vocabulary for social value in UK local government and beyond. It provides a structured hierarchy: broad themes such as local employment or environmental sustainability, outcomes beneath them, and specific measures with proxy financial values so that different kinds of benefit can be compared on a single scale. Central government commonly uses the Social Value Model with its own themes and policy outcomes.

Proxy values are both the strength and the weakness of the approach. They let an evaluator compare an apprenticeship against a volunteering commitment without arguing about which is intrinsically better. But they also invite gaming: a supplier who understands the model can maximise the headline dependent value by selecting high value measures they were going to deliver anyway. Buyers who weight only the total pound figure get the behaviour they design for.

The better practice is to score against relevance and deliverability as well as value. Ask what the commitment does for this community, whether it is additional to business as usual, whether the supplier has delivered similar before, and how it will be evidenced. Then carry the specific measures into the contract as deliverables rather than aspirations.

• Themes: the high level policy area, such as jobs, growth, social or environmental outcomes
• Outcomes: what changes as a result, expressed in community terms
• Measures: countable units such as apprenticeship weeks, local spend, hours volunteered
• Proxy values: an indicative financial value that allows comparison between measures
• Evidence: the document, record or system entry that proves the measure was delivered

Designing a social value question that works

Weighting is the first decision. A weighting that is too low signals that social value is decorative and suppliers will treat it accordingly. A weighting that is too high on a contract with little scope for community benefit distorts award towards a supplier who is good at writing about it. The weighting should be proportionate to the contract value, duration and the realistic room a supplier has to create benefit through delivery.

The second decision is prescription. Open questions invite scattergun responses that are hard to compare and harder to manage. Targeted questions, where the buyer names one or two priority outcomes drawn from its own corporate strategy and asks suppliers how they will contribute, produce comparable answers and commitments that align with what the organisation actually needs. Local employment in a specific ward is more useful than social value in general.

The third decision is evidence. State in the tender what evidence will be required, how often it must be provided, and what happens if commitments are not met. If social value obligations will become contract KPIs, say so before tenders are submitted. Suppliers price and pitch differently when they know a commitment is enforceable, which is precisely the point.

From bid commitment to contract clause

The single biggest failure point in social value is the handover between the procurement team and the contract manager. A supplier makes twelve commitments in a bid. The bid is scored, the contract is awarded, and the commitments live on in a PDF that nobody opens again. Two years later a councillor asks what social value the contract delivered and the honest answer is that nobody knows.

The fix is structural. Social value commitments should be extracted from the winning tender into a schedule of the contract, with each commitment expressed as a measure, a target quantity, a delivery period, an evidence requirement and an owner on both sides. Where appropriate, tie a proportion of the commitments to milestones so that delivery is spread across the term rather than back loaded into a final year scramble.

Governance then does the rest. Put social value on the contract review agenda alongside performance and finance, report exceptions rather than volume, and agree in advance what happens when a commitment cannot be delivered for legitimate reasons. Substitution of an equivalent measure, agreed and recorded, is far better than a quiet failure that surfaces at contract end.

Reporting, audit and public scrutiny

Social value reporting is now scrutinised from several directions at once. Internal audit tests whether claimed benefits were evidenced. Members and non executive directors ask what the organisation got for its spend. Scrutiny committees and freedom of information requests probe specific contracts. Under the transparency regime, contract performance information is published, so the gap between what was promised and what was delivered is more visible than it used to be.

The practical requirement is an auditable chain: the question asked, the response submitted, the score awarded and the rationale, the commitment as written into the contract, the periodic returns from the supplier, the evidence attached to each return, and the aggregated position at organisation level. If any link in that chain lives in a spreadsheet on somebody's laptop, the report will not survive challenge.

Aggregation is where most organisations struggle. Individual contract managers may track their own commitments reasonably well, but nobody can answer the corporate question of total apprenticeships created or total local spend generated across the contract portfolio, because every contract counts things differently. Standardising on one measurement framework and capturing returns in a consistent structure is what makes portfolio reporting possible at all.

Sector specifics

Councils typically have the strongest social value machinery because the outcomes map directly onto corporate priorities: local employment, town centre vitality, care leaver opportunities, carbon targets in a declared climate emergency. The risk is fragmentation across directorates, with adult social care, highways and corporate services all using different questions and different weightings for the same organisation.

The NHS approaches social value through a mix of net zero requirements in supply chains, workforce and health inequality objectives, and framework level expectations set by national buying organisations. Contracts are often let through frameworks, which means the social value question may have been asked at framework level and needs to be refreshed and made specific at call off, otherwise the local benefit is lost.

Housing associations, education bodies and charities each have their own angle. Housing associations have a natural fit between contract delivery and tenant outcomes: training, employment and community investment for the people living in the homes being maintained. Schools, academy trusts and colleges are usually buying at lower values with limited procurement capacity, so proportionality matters more than sophistication. Utilities in water, energy and transport can attach social and environmental obligations to their dynamic markets and member competitions, and may charge suppliers membership and award fees, unlike general contracting authorities.

See our housing associations page for how this plays out in a sector with strong community obligations and constrained procurement resource.

What goes wrong, and how to avoid it

The most common failure is unmeasurable language. Commitments that use verbs like support, promote, encourage or explore cannot be evidenced and should not be scored. If a commitment cannot be expressed as a number with a date attached, it belongs in the narrative, not in the scored schedule. Evaluators should be trained to mark accordingly, and moderation should test whether a high score can actually be justified from the text.

The second failure is double counting. A supplier delivering three contracts for the same buyer may report the same apprentice against all three. Without a portfolio view and a supplier level record, the buyer aggregates fiction. The third is displacement: a commitment that simply moves an existing activity from one place to another creates no additional benefit, however impressive the proxy value looks.

The fourth is proportionality. Asking a small local supplier bidding for a modest contract to produce a full social value plan with a dozen measures is a barrier to entry that pushes work towards larger national suppliers, which is usually the opposite of what the policy intends. Scale the ask to the contract, and be willing to accept fewer, better commitments from smaller organisations.

• Vague verbs with no quantity, date or geography
• Group level corporate reporting offered as contract specific benefit
• The same activity counted across multiple contracts
• Commitments back loaded to the final months of the term
• No named owner on either side, so nobody chases the return
• Requirements disproportionate to the value and scope of the contract

How eSourcing Data supports social value

eSourcing Data covers source to contract in one platform: sourcing and tendering, supplier onboarding and assurance, evaluation and moderation, contract management, governance and audit, analytics and reporting, and below threshold workflows. Social value is not a bolt on module in that model. It is a thread that runs from the tender question through scoring and moderation into the contract record and the reporting layer.

In tendering, social value questions can be built from a standard library with the measurement framework attached, so every competition in the organisation asks in a consistent structure. In evaluation, scores and rationales are captured against published criteria with a full moderation trail, which is what makes an award defensible if it is questioned. At award, the winning commitments carry forward into the contract record rather than being retyped.

In delivery, suppliers submit periodic returns against their committed measures with evidence attached, contract managers review exceptions, and the organisation can aggregate delivered social value across the portfolio rather than contract by contract. The platform has UK data residency and is GDPR compliant, and is available to public buyers through RM1557.15 G-Cloud 15, where our software services are listed on the Digital Marketplace and bought as call off contracts.

If you want to model what a weighting change would mean before you set it, our social value calculator is a practical starting point, and the Procurement Library holds the underlying guidance.