Emma Cox
Social value is a simple idea wearing a lot of jargon. Strip the acronyms away and it means the wider good a contract does beyond the thing it was actually paid for: the apprentice taken on, the local supplier used instead of the usual national account, the mentoring that came about naturally, or the materials that would otherwise have gone to landfill.
It’s a genuinely public sector idea, and one with a longer history than the 2012 Act alone suggests. Government contracts have carried social conditions of one kind or another for a long time. The Public Services (Social Value) Act formalised the requirement for public bodies to consider social value and came into force in January 2013. Since 2020, that has added up to £32bn of validated social value: real jobs, real local spend and real carbon saved (Legislation.gov.uk, 2012; Social Value Portal, 2026a).
Private clients are now catching up in their own way. Some are already asking the same questions as public sector evaluators, without any law telling them to. Any business bidding for public or private work is therefore ahead of the game if it can answer those questions with something real rather than a paragraph of promises. What’s changing is how seriously anyone checks whether those promises were actually delivered.
Most SME contractors don’t have a bid team in the way a tier one main contractor does. What they usually have is a bid coordinator stitching together a response with input from whoever can spare the time: the delivery lead on the technical solution, finance working out the pennies and a resourcing manager confirming who’s actually free. Social value goes into that same document, written with just as much care as the rest of it.
Then the contract is won, and attention turns to the part of the job everyone’s paid to notice: the actual works, delivered on budget, snagged and signed off. The social value commitments, agreed with just as much intention at bid stage, can end up treated as the bit that can wait.
Ask around afterwards and everyone has a reasonable answer for why it wasn’t them. The bid coordinator wrote it into the response, so surely it’s operations’ job now the contract is live. The delivery team are busy building the thing they were contracted to build, so perhaps it belongs to someone back in the office. The directors saw it in the winning bid and assumed someone below them was tracking it.
Every answer is reasonable on its own. Add them together and the honest answer is nobody. That’s frustrating to admit, but worth being real about.
Fast forward a few months and someone asks for the evidence. There isn’t much beyond a good memory and a few photos on somebody’s phone.
Thrive, a social value measurement and reporting platform, describes a five-year public contract where the social value commitments made at bid stage were never mentioned again during delivery. It wasn’t until the final review that the issue resurfaced, by which point there was nothing left to show for them (Thrive Platform, 2026).
It happens because delivering social value never got the same structure as delivering the contract itself, not because anyone stopped caring about it.
It’s worth being honest and positive about how far the industry has already come. Social value used to be an afterthought bolted onto the end of a tender response, a paragraph nobody expected to be read closely. Most businesses now know what it is, most bid coordinators know it needs writing properly, and plenty of what goes into a method statement is genuinely happening on site.
The gap was never effort. It’s what happens to that effort once everyone’s attention moves to the day job.
There are genuinely good social value consultants out there now. They can audit what’s actually happening on site and hand back a list of things a business didn’t even realise it could already prove. It’s still a young field, as Social Value Portal has itself acknowledged, but a growing one (Social Value Portal, 2024).
Not every business can stretch to bringing someone like that in, and that’s fine. It’s also worth saying plainly that it can feel harder right now, rather than easier, to fight for smaller, less lucrative jobs while being asked to prove more to win them. Working consistently with what you’ve got still beats waiting for resource you don’t have yet.
That gap doesn’t get to stay invisible any more.
The Construction Playbook wired social value into how government builds public infrastructure in December 2020. But the model underneath it split its weighting across eight separate outcomes, meaning no single promise in a method statement carried enough weight to change who won a contract (Cabinet Office, 2020a; 2020b).
PPN 026 changes that. From January 2027, the new Social Value Model focuses on two outcomes: good jobs and skills. It applies to covered procurements by central government departments, executive agencies and non-departmental public bodies worth £1 million or more. Contracts worth between £1 million and under £5 million will carry a minimum 10% social value weighting, rising to a minimum 20% for contracts worth £5 million or more (Cabinet Office, 2026).
For the first time, what you can prove and what you win are becoming part of the same conversation.
Deliver badly against a published KPI and that can follow you into the next tender. Under PPN 026, evidence of poor performance against social value KPIs can be taken into account when considering whether there are grounds to exclude suppliers from future tenders. For contracts worth £5 million or more, at least one social value KPI must be set and KPI performance is subject to publication requirements under the Procurement Act 2023 (Cabinet Office, 2026).
None of that has to be daunting. Digital social value platforms can make recording evidence something that happens as you go: a photo, a name and a date logged at the time, rather than a scramble to reconstruct two years of activity before a review.
The bar isn’t perfection. It’s simply having something to show.
PPN 026 puts much greater emphasis on that evidence being captured and monitored. That’s the stick, and it’s real.
What most businesses miss is the opportunity that comes with it.
Evidence captured to satisfy an evaluator doesn’t have to stop being a compliance record. The apprentice, the local subcontractor or the mentoring somebody is already doing can provide exactly what a case study, LinkedIn post, website page, trade press article or pitch meeting needs. And it’s already been written down, dated and checked.
Most businesses do the work, satisfy the KPI and leave it there, filed somewhere procurement can find it but nobody else ever will.
That’s the opportunity hiding inside the obligation. The same discipline that keeps a business compliant also gives marketing something real to say, consistently, across everything a business puts out, not just the next tender.
A business that’s visibly been doing this for years doesn’t just answer a method statement question better. It walks into the next tender already halfway believed because someone, whether a client, journalist or evaluator, has seen the proof before.
Done consistently, it’s marketing directly affecting the bottom line, bid after bid, because trust doesn’t reset to zero every time you submit.
Somewhere in most construction businesses, that proof already exists. It’s just sitting with the person who did the work, rather than the person who wrote it into the bid, and further still from whoever’s job it is to make sure someone else finds out.
References
Cabinet Office (2020a). The Construction Playbook.
Cabinet Office (2020b). Procurement Policy Note 06/20: Taking Account of Social Value in the Award of Central Government Contracts.
Cabinet Office (2025). Procurement Act 2023.
Cabinet Office (2026). Procurement Policy Note 026: The Social Value Model.
Legislation.gov.uk (2012). The Public Services (Social Value) Act 2012 (Commencement) Order 2012. e
Social Value Portal (2024). Social Value Jobs: Pioneering a Path to Purpose.
Social Value Portal (2026a). Why 2026 Will Be a Step Change for Social Value.
Thrive Platform (2026). From Weighting to Worth: Why Social Value Is Won or Lost After the Contract Is Awarded.
Emma Cox FCIM
Fractional Marketing Director