Prioritising social value

We recently welcomed professionals from across our diverse portfolio to launch our Social Value Working Group.

The working group creates a space for our portfolio companies to share knowledge, ideas and tools around social value.

Our launch event enabled members of the group to meet in person, network, and receive some initial training on a topic becoming increasingly important to each company and their key customers.

What is social value, and why is it important?

Social value is about changes in our wellbeing. It encourages organisations and individuals to consider the broader impact of their actions beyond profit, promoting positive change within communities by focusing on improving wellbeing, addressing social inequalities, and contributing to a more sustainable future.

We kicked off the session by discussing existing knowledge and awareness of social value and shared challenges across the group. This was followed by a social value ‘lunch and learn’ session with Matt Haworth and Catherine Manning from Measure Up, who offer a free social value reporting framework. They got us up to speed on the basics of social value, explained how it impacts public sector service procurement tenders, and highlighted some of the valuation tools and frameworks that are available.

We closed out the session with a discussion led by Principal Sustainability Consultant Claire Richards and Sustainability Manager Nikhita Mistry, where we dived into ideas for the year ahead. Below are some of the outcomes:

Key focus areas for 2025

Impact screening

• Conduct an impact screening to assess how each organisation’s efforts align with other benchmarks.

Social value policies

• Develop and implement social value policies to outline commitment to internal and external stakeholders.

Analyse social value themes in tenders

• Review key tenders to identify recurring themes, customer interests, and focus areas.
• Examine what has scored well and share learnings with working group.

Feedback and collaboration

• Gather feedback on tender performance, including scores and client comments.
• Collaborate with the team at Measure Up and their local authority working group to pool experiences, seek guidance, and address systemic issues.
• Pool knowledge from past experiences of working with local authorities. Identify patterns, strengths, and challenges to build a more strategic approach to working with different regions.

Local needs analysis

• Conduct localised analyses for customers and their communities’ needs.
• Tailor social value strategy to account for local priorities and demonstrate how social value initiatives address them.

Standardise and organise

• Create a central resource bank to collect social value-related information, examples, and data whenever a tender mentions it. This ensures consistency and helps identify gaps or strengths in the current approach.

Drive organisational commitment

• Advocate for senior leadership to account for social value by appointing dedicated resource.
• Integrate social value metrics into broader impact assessments and cross-reference with other metrics to identify overlooked areas of value.

Encourage specificity in tenders

• Work with local authorities and tender issuers to request more specific and structured requirements. This will give bidders clearer opportunities to differentiate their proposals.

Many thanks to everyone who attended, we hope you all took something away from the day.