How can public procurement help deliver social value?

Social value is a cornerstone of public procurement — and for professional services, an opportunity to apply our strengths to deliver positive outcomes for society.

Here, social value experts Lori Alexa-Smith and Kieran Ronnie explain the common demands placed on professional services when delivering social value, how we address them, and how procurers can leverage professional services’ diverse skillsets to maximise social value results.

Social value, done well, can transform communities, generating significant, long-term societal and economic legacies. Yet different sub-sectors, and indeed different companies within the infrastructure sector deliver social value effectively in different ways. We need to recognise where we are best suited to deliver social outcomes.  

For example, contractors are often best placed to provide social value through on-site focused measures, such as providing local employment and significant local and SME spend.  

In contrast, the professional services’ operating model — of regional office teams, working across numerous frameworks and clients — means we need to think differently.  

Within professional services we generally don’t recruit people into single projects, but instead recruit into teams working across projects and sometimes sectors, providing our time and knowledge rather than physical resources. It is absolutely possible to deliver tangible, measurable social value through this structure — the key is to identify and play to our strengths.  

Deploying corporate scale to address localised challenges

We can use our corporate initiatives, expertise and scale to support equitable, people-centric project delivery within a local context. For example, as a professional services firm, one of our core offerings is our technical expertise — which we can provide to community and third sector organisations which may not have the in-house knowledge or funds to access.  

Using this approach of matching professional services abilities to a local need or challenge, our client Network Rail presented an opportunity for us to provide pro bono landscaping services for Kentish Town City Farm, which is the oldest city farm in the UK and a significant community facility in North London.  

Our landscape architect professionals developed a concept design for the re-provision of a new horse arena and viewing area, which will be used extensively by the community, including various disabled access groups, and increase biodiversity through the introduction of local wildflowers which will enable local children to enjoy previously inaccessible land.

In addition to this, we have also developed a wider masterplan to highlight future opportunities for the farm. Following this work, we are now providing pro bono building surveying services to conduct a condition survey of all the buildings on the site to enable the farm to develop a planned maintenance programme.  

Professional services must identify and enable long-term solutions  

For professional services, providing impactful social value is about identifying core business competencies and skills, and sharing these with communities in a long-term, sustainable way, aligning this social value approach to the overall organisational culture and strategy.  

This delivers outcomes and builds capacity for the projects, clients and sectors that professional service providers operate in, and addresses the collective challenges we all face — such as developing the skills we need, increasing representation or diversifying supply chain.  

For example, the UK is facing a green skills gap. We work with social enterprise The Land Collective to deliver our ESG Launchpad to young people from a diverse range of backgrounds.  

This programme includes technical workshops on ESG and measurement and reporting, employability support with our early careers team, and presenting to our senior leadership in our Head Office.  

We’re sharing our ESG knowledge and expertise to address a known challenge for us and our sector, with solutions that create long-term opportunities in young people’s lives.  

With an abundance of social value metrics, knowing how to accurately track and report outcomes can be difficult. 

While there are several different measurement frameworks for social value, there isn’t one accepted, standardised benchmark for doing good work. This can create some confusion in the market, but with informed application, it need not be a barrier to effective delivery.  

Given that each company and sector will offer something different, the fact that we have different and bespoke frameworks that allow us to measure different things could turn out to be a net positive. We just need to understand and be clear about what we are measuring, and how this measurement will be used.  

Recognising the value of public procurement

We are positive about the future of delivering social outcomes in our industry. The commitment is there — but the methods to achieve it are in some cases yet to be fully implemented or understood.  

In a challenging, constrained economic environment, leveraging professional services to build social value is about recognising what this section of the industry does best. We can identify the unique tools, insights and capabilities a professional service provider can offer — and maximise them.