Social Value Toolkit for Cooperative Councils

About the project

Despite the hype, Social Value isn’t working.

It’s become a procedural hurdle rather than the transformative tool originally promised. And this is a significant problem for Cooperative Councils that want to utilise their spending power to transform local economies, generate agency and control in communities, and stimulate new markets and services that support local missions.

This policy lab is the product of a deep dive into the use of social value in local government. It brings together insights 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 shows cooperative councils how to be bold, innovative, and creative in identifying and determining how to assess for and achieve social value and ‘Maximum Public Benefit’ in a given local context.  It provides CCIN members with the tools and mindset shift needed to meet government ambitions to be ‘mission driven’ in their procurement and commissioning.

It includes the following outputs:

• Executive Summary
• Practitioners Toolkit
• Supporting Narrative
• Legal Framework
• Case Studies 

The case studies and approaches in the toolkit offer an expansive and legally compliant way of understanding, developing, and delivering social value within local councils. They invite 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.

To achieve this we recommend that councils should:

• Set broad aspirational policy frameworks and goals which can guide context-specific social value decision making.
• Recognise the importance of open, iterative governance structures like relational contracts, ‘thin layer’ cooperatives, alliance contracts and public commons partnerships when working with complex, long-term social, economic and environmental goals.
• Actively promote use of collaborative commissioning pathways where systems are complex and goals are long term.
• Embed social value requirements in the core contract deliverables in competitive market purchasing and avoid using ‘pick and mix’ social value menus.
• In competitive markets, tailor assessment processes and contract specifications to a scale which enables SMEs, social enterprises, and cooperatives to access opportunities.
• Support staff to understand principles of collaborative commissioning and how this might apply to their professional context
• Explore local opportunities to seed public commons partnerships, public service community partnerships, and innovation partnerships; and invite communities and partners to initiate proposals.
• Consider how internal commissioning resources could be reprofiled towards service design and system stewardship, as opposed to social value compliance and audit.
• Advocate for an independent National Social Value Taskforce.