Posted 20th November 2019
Social Value UK is launching a brand-new Thought Leadership Group called Contract for Change. This group will bring together volunteers to collaborate, and embed the principles of social value into procurement and commissioning best practice.
This initiative is a major opportunity for the procurement profession to make a significant contribution to a national policy initiative which has implications at every level of society and within each of the organisations we work for and organisations we work with.
This Thought Leadership Group will harness the know-how from procurement and social value practitioners from across civil society, the public and particularly the private sectors to embed this in mainstream practice.
The Opportunity
Approaches to implementing social value within procurement have taken great strides forward over recent years. This has included the development of legislation and policy, while various practical techniques such as measurement tools and methodologies have been adopted. Both procurement professionals, stakeholders and suppliers now have a far greater understanding of the potential of social value, with many procurements already incorporating specific social value evaluation criteria.
The opportunity today is to amalgamate existing work and create an extensive and readily available body of best practice that will enable professionals and organisations to embed social value more effectively into strategic and operating practices.
Social Value UK as a national chapter of Social Value International. We advocate for a ‘principles-led’ approach to accounting for social value. These principles can also be embedded throughout an organisation from functional strategy all the way down to detailed procurement operating practices. This would include embedding social value creation in:
- Organisational procurement strategy development;
- Business planning and business case development;
- Procurement and commissioning policy, governance and processes;
- Category management, including pre-market engagement, specification development, sourcing, contract management and SRM;
- Performance management, measurement of outcomes and Social Return on Investment (SROI).
The Approach
The Thought Leadership Group will therefore gather examples of best practice procurement approaches from across civil society organisations, the public and private sector, then combine, develop and share these to create a suite of strategic and operational approaches, tools, templates and guidance that will benefit all stakeholder groups. The initial step is to collaboratively establish the following:
• Terms of Reference;
• An implementation plan;
• Best practice guidance;
• Agreed suite of specific tools and templates;
• Develop practical case studies.
The entire approach (relevant documents, e.g. Terms of Reference), process and intellectual property will be made freely available via Social Value UK to add to the body of knowledge that already exists.
How Can you Help?
Get Involved! We want to involve as many people from as wide a range of backgrounds as possible in this work. We are grateful to our board member David Shields who has committed time and resources to help get this initiative off the ground. If you feel you have something to contribute to any of the groups described above, please get in touch by emailing [email protected] by 22nd November 2019.
Contribute! If you have any guidance, case studies, documents or templates to share, please also send these to the following email: [email protected]. This will help us baseline what is already available and inform the outline programme plan.
Download the full letter on Contract for Change by SVUK Board Member David Shields here.