Social value isn’t broken. It’s just waiting to be connected.
That’s the simplest way to describe where we are right now. The policy is good. The intent is clear. The Procurement Act 2023 puts social value at the heart of every major public contract. But when that policy hits the reality of councils, contractors, and charities, something gets lost in translation.
The gap isn’t moral. Everyone agrees that public money should serve both the project and the people it touches. The gap is structural. The people who make the promises are rarely the ones who can deliver them.
The good idea that got tangled
Under the 2023 Procurement Act, every major public contract must now include measurable social value outcomes. The principle is simple: if you’re doing public work, you should leave the community better than you found it.
That part works. The trouble starts when those commitments move from the contract page into practice.
At the top end, large companies have entire CSR or social value teams dedicated to delivery. But for small and medium businesses, the ones most often winning local work, there’s no such structure. They sign a contract that includes a social value commitment and then realise they have no idea how to meet it.
A few weeks ago I spoke at the Institute for Social Value’s monthly forum. At the event I said, “smaller businesses don’t have social value teams, they have people trying to do three jobs at once.”
So, they start searching. They reach out to local charities, often after the contract has already begun, asking them to deliver something, anything, that will satisfy the evidence requirements of the local authority.
And that’s where things start to unravel.
The charity side of the problem
Charities aren’t sitting around waiting for the phone to ring. They’re overstretched, underfunded, and already working flat out. When a business arrives asking for help to “tick off” a social value target, it can feel more like a burden than an opportunity.
As one charity told me, what they often experience are “helicopters” – companies that drop in, do a one-off event, take the photo, and disappear.
The result? Everyone walks away unsatisfied. The company has technically delivered its commitment, the council gets a spreadsheet full of numbers, and the community is left wondering what changed.
The policy is good. The delivery is suspect. It becomes lost in translation.
How we fix the connection
Social value fails when it’s reactive. It succeeds when it’s designed.
Rather than leaving every contractor to improvise, we should be building modular, investable projects in advance; social value initiatives that are contract-ready, measurable, and beneficial to both the charity and the business.
That means helping charities design scalable programmes that meet specific social value indicators, employment, skills, wellbeing, environment, and making them available as ready-to-fund projects. Businesses can then plug into these schemes with confidence, knowing their contribution genuinely delivers impact rather than admin.
When that happens, everyone benefits:
- The council gets verified outcomes.
- The business meets its obligations without burning time.
- The charity gains funding and capacity on its own terms.
Social value becomes what it was meant to be – practical, balanced, and human.
The system doesn’t need to be torn down. It just needs to be connected. The dots are all there, government policy, private-sector willingness, and community need. The next step is joining them with intent and strategy, not box-ticking and panic.
In Part 2 of this series, we’ll look at how small businesses can turn social value from a compliance burden into a competitive advantage.
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