Social Value Policy

Contents

1. What is Social Value?
2. Our Social Value Priorities
3. Our commitments
4. Monitoring and Measuring Social Value Success
5. Governance and Oversight

Reading Borough Council’s (RBC) vision is to help Reading realise its potential and to ensure that everyone who lives and works here can share in the benefits of its success. This policy sets out the council’s commitment to create thriving communities, an inclusive economy, and healthy environment.

With an annual spend throughout the Reading borough, on bought-in goods, services and works of over £150 million, it is imperative that the council manages this spend responsibly to ensure we obtain value for money, support the council’s wider objectives, and meet our legislative requirements.  To this end, RBC is committed to ensuring that when we make decisions about spending money, or when we design and deliver services, we do this in a way that maximises positive social, economic, and environmental impact for our community and local economy, supporting business to go beyond foundational economic social and governance initiatives for Reading’s benefit.

The policy describes our understanding of Social Value, what value it can add and how we are looking to maximise this opportunity.

1. What is Social Value?

Social Value is commonly used to describe the total positive impact on society of a contract beyond purely delivering its core outputs. Contracts can create social, economic, and environmental benefit for our residents, for our local economy and for our environment, delivering measurable change for the better.

The Public Services (Social Value) Act 2012 placed an obligation on local authorities to consider the social good and wider impact that could come from the procurement of services.  Councils are required to give consideration of Social Value in all purchasing and disposal procedures, including it in evaluation processes and tracking delivery in contract management.

The National Procurement Policy Statement (NPPS) sets out national priority outcomes for Social Value. It places emphasis on creating new businesses, new jobs and new skills; tackling climate change and reducing waste, and improving supplier diversity, innovation and resilience, all pointing towards increased flexibility for local authorities to commission for Social Value and use their buying power to support local communities.

Overall, legislation has redefined “obtaining value for money through procurement” from being purely cost-saving to adding Social Value. RBC embraces this change in direction and wishes to design contract solutions with our communities in mind, ensuring what we deliver maximises the positive impact for the Borough.

Why we are doing this.

Social Value has the potential to release millions of pounds of public money for community benefit and support the Borough’s residents. It encourages smarter spending to not only deliver a contracted service but also addresses social, economic, and environmental issues in the local community.

This supports the Corporate Plan themes by

• Promoting fair employment practices by encouraging workforce equality and diversity within supply chains; offering a range of apprenticeship, training, and skills development opportunities, as well as employment opportunities supporting our commitment to the people of Reading in continuing to build on Thriving Communities.
• Encouraging a diverse range of suppliers to work with us, including small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) and 3rd sector organisations (e.g. charities), maximising opportunities for local organisations, and promoting the use of local supply chains to retain money in Reading, supporting our goal for the creation of an Inclusive Economy.
• Promoting greater environmental sustainability through minimising waste and pollution, supporting carbon reduction initiatives, and furthering energy efficiency and other sustainability programmes to help to achieve a Healthy Environment.

2. Our Social Value Priorities

The council has set out our Social Value priorities, our aims, benefits they will bring and our methods of ensuring a successful delivery:

Priority	Aim	Method of ensuring successful delivery	Benefit
Increasing local wellbeing, employment & reducing inequality	To tackle poverty and employment inequalities by creating inclusive employment, apprenticeships, and training opportunities for local people to reduce unemployment and raise the skills level of our local workforce, especially in target groups such as care leavers and local schools. With a focus on the wellbeing of our young people and vulnerable adults.	Encourage our suppliers to make a local impact by supporting initiatives to improve local facilities and by encouraging them to operate paid staff volunteering schemes to support local community groups and initiatives. Encourage our contractors to create more opportunities for apprenticeships, work placements and jobs. Encourage our suppliers to support those from a Sanctuary seeking background into employment. Work in partnership with employers, training providers and employment services to promote and co-ordinate access to local employment and training opportunities. Promote diversity, inclusion, equality and fair targeting effort towards those in greatest disadvantage and tackle deprivation across the borough. Encourage contractors to promote and sponsor opportunities for vulnerable children, care leavers and adults who are in need of care and support.	Achieving greater community and place-based outcomes through working in partnership with our communities and third-party contractors. Responding to our communities’ needs to fulfil our mutual goals. Maximising new job creation and apprenticeships, increasing overall labour demand in the borough, and ensuring residents are supported into these opportunities. Supporting unemployed Reading residents, and those seeking sanctuary, to re-enter work as quickly as possible – especially priority cohorts. Ensuring those from vulnerable groups have a route into employment opportunities which they might have not otherwise had.
Think local to help build Reading’s economy	To take account of the social and economic impacts of buying locally when commissioning and contracting and encourage our suppliers and contractors to do the same.	Work with enterprises and organisations such as the Federation of Small Businesses to build trust locally, provide transparency in supply chains and improve visibility of local suppliers. Collaborate with partners to support local businesses and SMEs to access public sector opportunities by make procurements (both directly from the council and through our contractors) accessible to a diverse supply base including the third (voluntary) sector, social enterprises, and local suppliers. Provide mentoring and support to assist these organisations to tender for and deliver these supply opportunities where necessary. Encourage our suppliers and partners to buy locally and where appropriate make it a requirement for key contractors to advertise new supply chain opportunities. Deliver a framework that recognises the value and importance of supplier relationship management and collaboration across the public, private and third sector to drive innovation and greater value.	Delivering more, using our own local resources, and limiting our climate impact from long-distance suppliers who would be required to deliver in-person. Increasing accessibility for Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) and Voluntary, Community and Social Enterprises (VCSE) to the council’s opportunities to fulfil our needs from those who are closest to our residents. Taking evidence-based decisions and using robust reporting of performance on how ‘thinking local’ is best serving the council’s requirements. Ensuring ethical, responsible sourcing that reflects the council’s values. Developing the confidence, skills and capability of our people and suppliers. Bringing organisations of different sizes and sectors together to deliver a diverse local economy which is able to grow and expand should it wish to do so.
Tackling climate change and investing in a greener future	To protect the natural environment, address our impact on the climate emergency, minimise waste, reduce energy consumption and use other resources efficiently whether local or beyond Reading where our activity has a national or global impact.	Ensure that we follow procurement processes built around sustainability which will exploit the opportunity to minimise energy consumption, carbon footprint, waste, pollution, production of greenhouse gas emissions and detrimental environmental impacts while encouraging others to do likewise and using carbon offsetting as a last resort. Eliminate unnecessary waste by our partners and our own goods buying, and adopt the “reduce, reuse, recycle” philosophy, supporting circular economy and sharing economy through ‘Think before you purchase – do you really need it, could something else be used, or could we hire or borrow it?’	Creating long term sustainable value for money decisions via a whole life approach to procuring and managing contracts. Only using what we need, knowing what we will need to use in the future, how we use it and what happens to it after to that our impact on the local area and planet is reduced. Ensuring partners are using fewer resources throughout the supply chain by reducing any demands or requirements in our policies and purchases which may be harmful to our environment and are considerate to the need to create a greener future.

3. Our commitments

Working with our communities

• We will work on an on-going basis with residents, communities, and partners to understand what is most important to communities in Reading and capture needs and desired outcomes.  We will use this work to continually review our Social Value priority areas to ensure they remain relevant and impactful.

Working with our contractors

• We will engage with contractors to ensure current and potential future contractors understand our ambitions and to help ensure our approach to procurement supports contractors to provide their best endeavours towards our priorities.
• We will work in partnership with our contractors to ensure the promised Social Value is delivered.

Within Reading Borough Council

• All service teams will be trained in how to design Social Value in tenders and how to monitor achievements throughout the contract lifecycle.
• Social Value priority areas will be reviewed annually, drawing on insight from a range of stakeholders including residents, partners, and service teams.

Within our procurement lifecycle

• When spending any amount of public money, we plan right from the start how we can build our Social Value priorities into the design and delivery of our contracts to generate the greatest possible social impact.
  • Sustainable: Social Value to be focused on long term outcomes and on building enduring, productive relationships between the contractor and the supported community.
• In tender processes the minimum weighting we apply to Social Value (including environmental sustainability) will be 5%, yet we will aspire to apply a higher Social Value weighting of up to 20% dependant on the nature of the procurement.  For example, where pre-market engagement demonstrated that the approach would significantly reduce competition due to a lack of market maturity in delivery Social Value the minimum weighting would be applied.  However, where there is a higher market maturity, a high weighting can be applied.
• We will capture, record and track all Social Value and its impact delivered through our contracts.
  • Measurable: Positive changes in Social Value should always be measurable and, where relevant, can also be presented in financial terms.
• The Social Value Act requires us to consider Social Value in delivery of all services with a value above Find a Tender Service (FTS) threshold. We will go beyond this by having regard to the importance of maximising public benefit in all our procurements above £125k, threshold as defined in RBC’s Constitution Part 4 Contract Procedure Rules and will aim to go further by considering Social Value in all spend where pre-market engagement deems it appropriate.
• In line with government guidance, we will consider reserving procurements below FTS threshold for businesses local to Reading and/or for SMEs and VCSEs.
• To reflect the council’s commitment to achieving zero carbon by 2030, all Capital funded procurements above a total contract value of £5m will allocate up to 5% of the evaluation weighting to a supplier’s contribution to carbon reduction within their own operations.  In limited circumstances where this is not considered practicable, this score may be revised for an individual tender.

4. Monitoring and Measuring Social Value Success

Social Value outcomes and related key performance indicators will be incorporated as core contract outcomes in contract documents and contract managers will take ownership of ensuring all Social Value committed to is delivered. Commissioners and contract managers will also be responsible for updating the Corporate Social Value Register, which will record all progress against outcomes so that we are able to measure successes.

We will evaluate the impact of Social Value delivery through:

• Measuring inputs and outputs.
• Measuring progress against outcomes.
• Attributing financial values to the above where relevant.
• Drawing on other qualitative methods to add depth and context to the Social Value created.

Governance and Oversight

The Chief Executive’s Corporate Management Team will oversee the implementation of this Social Value policy and they will be supported by a Procurement Transformation Group compromising of officers from the Procurement Hub and the Procurement Spokes from each Directorate.

A report outlining the Social Value that has been achieved will be produced annually and is planned to be submitted to Policy Committee.