Why social value must start with place, not policy

In the late 1700s, Prussian foresters set out to improve a messy forest. Wild woodland was hard to measure, so they cleared it and planted single-species timber in straight, even-aged rows. Now the state could count every tree and forecast every yield.

The first harvest was a triumph. The second was a disaster: stripped of the undergrowth, fungi and mixed species the soil quietly relied on, the tidy forest began to fail. The state had made the forest structured and administratively legible but not taken the time to understand what made it thrive.

Social value is at risk of heading down the same neat rows.

Andy Burnham put social value into the political foreground in his bid to become prime minister, to warm applause. In his Number 10 North speech last month, which included a pitch for a place-first economy, growth rooted in local suppliers and communities, he promised that every eligible public contract should carry “proper social value weighting”. Public procurement reimagined to grow good jobs and a resilient economy in every postcode. Concrete, appealing and instantly political.

The trouble begins when a simple instinct enters a government machine, where it becomes outcomes, criteria, model answers, reporting lines and a small industry of people - including people like us - paid to explain what “proper social value weighting” means. And that is when the critics arrive.

Maxwell Marlow of the Adam Smith Institute argues that social value has overloaded public buying with policy ambition. Each ask looks modest from the centre. From the supplier’s side the effect is cumulative: more bid cost, more consultancy, more boilerplate and more advantage for the firms with the people and systems to craft the right answer.

If the system rewards the organisations best at describing social value rather than those best at delivering it, something has gone wrong

His paper argues the model favours large businesses, marginalises small ones and reports so weakly that promises go unexamined after awarding contracts. He has a point. If the system rewards the organisations best at describing social value rather than those best at delivering it, something has gone wrong.

Nigel Farage went further in an online essay in June, framing social value as taxpayer-funded discrimination and net zero ideology. The language is crude, and it is not every day those working to improve procurement get caught up in an argument about how far “anti-White racism is embedded into the heart of the state”. But let’s not pretend it won’t land with some, and that is a real worry.

Not that the caricature is fair, but that social value often feels so disconnected from the people and communities it set out to support and serve with its proxy values, weighted scores, social return, policy fit. Inside the system it makes sense. Outside it, it sounds like someone took a common-sense idea and sent it on a consultancy retreat. The defence cannot be more jargon. If the answer to “why spend more public money on this?” is “the Model Award Criteria encourages inclusive outcomes against a weighted framework”, we should pack up and change careers now.

So, what do we do?

We could scrap it and simplify, as the think tank Re:State argues - back to price, quality and delivery, untouched by value. Yet our sector has felt the impact of that approach for two decades: unstable supply chains, poorer outcomes, less investment. Where value is not defined and weighted, cost prevails.

I can remember a time when there was no social value question, and the outcomes delivered were not better for it.

Perhaps then we build a better model on a simple discipline. National government sets the guardrails: legality, fairness, climate duties, competition and value for money. Places shape the priorities: skills, health, housing, resilience and local economic capacity. Programmes build the machinery: a visible pipeline, contracts local firms can bid for and routes to grow. Projects pick the relevant asks. Contracts manage delivery. It might sound neat, but it isn’t - every layer brings judgement and trade-offs.

I’m pretty sure if delivered well though, it will beat the current general theory of goodness and fingers-crossed approach demanded so often by tenders.

Above all, this is where place matters. Social value risks applying the same structure, management and measurement everywhere, before it understands the needs of place. The broader the heading, the more it might just about have some relevance - every place has some kind of jobs and skills challenge, so “jobs and skills” will always be an acceptable default, but far less frequently lead to a meaningful outcome. The trick is not the heading; it is the nuance underneath it, and this shouldn’t be left to the supplier side to decode.

None of this is theory. The Preston model, which Preston City Council developed with the Centre for Local Economic Strategies (CLES), showed what happens when anchor institutions - councils, hospitals, universities - point their spending at local suppliers and match procurement to local need: more money stays in the area, local firms grow and better jobs follow.

Birmingham has taken it as its starter for 10, and Greater Manchester openly credits Preston as its inspiration. It works, and it works because it starts from the place. Preston’s supply gaps are not Birmingham’s, and neither are its questions or answers.

So, if we start with place, the obstacle is rarely will: time, capacity and a lack of available evidence are all real challenges. Information and data matter, a 2025 University of Birmingham briefing found combined authorities still cannot get government data at the granularity they need to read their own places.

In my view, it isn’t that the information doesn’t exist, it is just hard to access, assemble and draw meaningful insight from. Let’s give a procurer that and help them to ask what will add value: what will create the most impact for this community, what suits this sector and what is actually achievable for this contract.

If we get this wrong, the critics win, because more weight placed on generic questions will prove Marlow right. We will have a louder model, not a better one.

This brings us back to the forest. The Prussian mistake was not planting trees. It was planting the same tree everywhere and calling the uniformity progress. That is the trap waiting for social value. Burnham’s Manchesterism is place-first by design: growth rooted in Greater Manchester’s own suppliers and communities. The danger comes when a place-based idea becomes a national rule: the place falls away, the weighting stays, and you are left planting the same tree in every postcode hoping it takes root.

The future of social value in procurement is not more weighting, and it is not one good idea imposed everywhere. It is asking the right question in the right place - before everyone applauds the wrong answer.

Ellie Jenkins is a partner at Akerlof