Employment and Skills Outcomes Based Review (OBR) – Final Report – Executive Summary
- September 2025
Councillor Jim Robbins
Chair of the CCIN and Leader of Swindon Borough Council
Social Value Toolkit for Cooperative Councils’
- 15th Apr 2025
The recently published National Procurement Policy Statement shows that the national government is serious about using procurement and commissioning as a lever for strategic change.
“Mission-driven government means raising our sights as a nation and focusing on ambitious, measurable, long-term objectives that provide a driving sense of purpose for the country. It means a new way of doing government that is more joined up, pushes power out to communities and harnesses new technology, all with one aim in mind – to put the country back in the service of working people.”
This policy lab should be taken as an invitation to local authorities to be bold, innovative, and creative in identifying and determining how to assess for and achieve ‘Maximum Public Benefit’ in a given local context. It provides CCIN members with the tools and mindset shift needed to meet this challenge.
It brings insights and exchanges from interviews, workshops, and working group meetings with private and public sector professionals, public benefit lawyers, academics, consultants, cooperatives, charities, social enterprises, and community activists.
It draws on a growing body of research and reports that recognise that much of the way we’ve come to define and practice social value offers limited scope for delivering the meaningful change needed and often works against harnessing the latent social value that exists within communities and organisations.
This toolkit outlines a radically different approach to understanding, developing, and delivering social value within local councils. It encourages councils to move beyond the dominant practice of treating social value as an additional set of criteria bolted on to existing processes and mindsets and towards something that drives each stage of the decision-making process and enables creativity, innovation, and collaboration with communities to develop long-term social benefit.
This toolkit is aimed at practitioners working in local authorities. An accompanying report explores the thinking, issues and methods in greater depth.
