Gone are the days where we add ‘additional benefits to the local community’ into the work we deliver, where our focus must now be on how we support communities and how we have a positive impact on people’s lives. For example, these range from standalone acts of volunteering and charitable fundraising, to reducing the effects of, and improving, issues such as poverty, crime, health and wellbeing, education and skills, and jobs – that’s a lot of impact to be generated!

Through CHIC’s procurement processes tenderers must offer their own plans for social value delivery through contracts. These offer a wide range of ideas that can be implemented through frameworks.  CHIC has recently been procuring multiple replacement and new frameworks and I, amongst others, have been reviewing the social value proposals being promoted by a whole range of supply chain organisations. 

The scope of work that is both being offered and already being delivered through contracts with CHIC’s members is incredible, where commitments to deliver effective social value programmes are clearly becoming more and more integral to the work we are all doing.  In addition, the ways in which such programmes are thought through, and ultimately delivered, is testament to the evolving understanding behind our joint commitment to be adding ‘social value’ through the work we all deliver together.

It has been rewarding for me to review tenders offered by some of the smallest organisations that clearly understand the need to have a positive impact on communities through the work they carry out, where their understanding of generating social value is clear.  Conversely, it has also been an eye-opener to see that some of the biggest companies still don’t have a fully developed or integrated social value offer; this perhaps reflects the challenge of cultural change in larger organisations.  Although we are seeing fantastic initiatives and programmes with measurable impact, there is clearly still some work to do!

Good procurement provides us with opportunities to design social value objectives which are relevant to specific priorities and to implement these objectives into contracts in ways which have real impact and are measurable.  The more we get this right at tender stage, the better these outcomes will become and so the communities we represent should all benefit from enhanced outcomes.