Social value - why it's important and tips for success
What is social value?
Social value is the wider positive economic, social and environmental impact your organisation has on society.
This impact is often measured using proxy values attributed to things such as improving local people’s skills, using local suppliers for goods and services or reducing carbon emissions. But it also includes telling the story about how your organisation operates in an ethical way to achieve these things.
Why think about social value?
Social value is part of the overall narrative about how Healthwatch benefits local residents. Although you may only be specifically asked about it as part of the tender process for your contract, thinking about it more routinely as part of your annual planning cycle will not only strengthen your tender response but also increase ongoing public and stakeholder support.
Different angles on social value
There are two ways of looking at the added social value of a Healthwatch service.
One way is to consider the added social and economic benefits linked to improvements made to healthcare services due to your insight. Your work contributes to people being more able to retain their employment, maintain a stable home, be socially active, focus on education and can reduce pressure on carers. Reduction of health inequalities can also benefit healthcare services by reducing demand. These links can easily be forgotten, so it’s useful to find opportunities to remind stakeholders, such as local councillors, about them as you talk about the impact achieved from investing in Healthwatch.
However, service commissioners view this social value achieved through the delivery of your core contract requirements as 'benefits realisation'. It's part of the rationale for why they are commissioning the service in the first place.
What they are looking for you to address during a procurement process is the additional social value you will bring through doing things over and above core activities and contract requirements. How will your socially responsible approach to the delivery of the contract benefit the community and wider society?
“We launched the Herefordshire Community Partnership to deliver extra social value from the way we work in collaboration with our communities. This has developed over 2 years to include a systemwide approach to a community paradigm model harnessing and building prevention offer in communities. By coordinating this forum of over 100 community representatives, we’re helping grow support and resilience around things such as cost of living, isolation and loneliness, rurality, transport and access and mental wellbeing.”
Christine Price, Chief Officer, Healthwatch Herefordshire
Social value as part of your contract tender process
The Public Services (Social Value) Act 2012 requires public authorities to consider how delivery of procured contracts could improve ‘economic, social and environmental well-being’ in their area. Scoring of tenders for contracts now typically includes between 5% and 20% based on the provider’s commitment to deliver additional social value.
While nationally commissioned public contracts tend to use the Cabinet Office’s Social Value Model, local authorities usually use either the National themes, outcomes and measures (TOMs) model from the Social Value Portal or their own locally developed social value framework. A new ‘TOMs Light’ was introduced to encourage further take-up of this model.
Both the Social Value Model and the TOMs model contain lists of social value outcomes that potential providers are asked to address and instructions for evaluating the responses. There’s usually a quantitative element with financial values attached and a qualitative element related to the plan or 'method statement' the provider gives to explain how they will achieve the outcomes. Usually, local authorities have one procurement team member who leads on social value as an additional responsibility.
Ideally, the approach shouldn't be totally prescriptive but instead, give broad category headings from TOMs or the council’s own framework priorities – such as achieving net zero or 'developing a strong, resilient local community' – and ask you to refer to the relevant framework to propose what you’ll deliver. This helps ensure your offer is relevant, proportionate and within your gift in relation to the contract itself. Less sophisticated and probably less helpful is when the question you’re asked to address more vaguely asks, 'What social value will you bring'.
Example: You’re asked to refer to TOMs Light to commit to helping achieve the social value objective of ‘increasing opportunities for disadvantaged people’. You explain in your method statement how you’ll employ someone who has been long-term unemployed. The proxy measure taken as the social value for this is listed as £20,429.
Check exactly how the local framework or TOMs defines a particular social value objective and what evidence you’ll need to provide.
Some ways you achieve additional social value, (for example, by increasing knowledge and resilience of community groups, employing community researchers or providing volunteering opportunities) whilst very valid, may or may not be exactly what your local authority is looking for to award points when scoring the tender.
Tips for success – and where some fail
- Understand the needs of the council and your local community and show this in the social value you propose to deliver.
- Check how your council defines ‘local’ when referring to the area where they are looking for you to deliver social value. They may, for example, use the local government boundary or refer to a radius of a certain number of miles from a town centre.
- Use any opportunity to ask the procurement department questions within the timescale allowed.
- Attend any pre-market engagement event. Understand what the council as a 'buyer’ is looking for.
- Make SMART commitments with KPIs, allowing the council to clearly know if you’ve met them.
- Make credible commitments that you have the capacity and ability to deliver. Procurement teams will be familiar with unrealistic over-promising.
- Provide a clear description of how you’ll achieve your commitments to score well in the qualitative evaluation.
- If you’re committing to increasing spending with local suppliers, ensure you have an ethical procurement policy you confirm you’ll follow. This should explain that whenever possible you will get quotes from local businesses. It should state that if they are the cheapest, then you would use them, but not if they are more expensive, and it would increase the cost of delivering the contract.
- Remember, there's a distinction between using a local supplier which brings ‘local economic value’ and using a local Community Interest Company (CIC) or Voluntary or Community Sector (VCS) supplier which brings social value.
- Whenever you take steps to increase or reduce something, such as through energy efficiency or recycling schemes, ensure you obtain benchmark figures to show the situation before you start.
- Whilst volunteering data is great for conveying the wider value of the Healthwatch service, social value frameworks are usually referring to paid staff volunteering for VCS organisations.
Part of business as usual
One of the best ways to strengthen your organisation’s position on social value when it comes to tendering for a new contract is to have already embedded it into your wider planning cycle.
If you’ve not already, then may now is the time to introduce a social value strategy and policy and an ethical procurement policy. Following that, develop an annual action plan with objectives to contribute to positive change through your added social value.
Thanks to Carol Glenn, Social Value Programme Manager, Solihull Metropolitan Borough Council for advice during the writing of this item.