Aureos is one of the UK’s fastest-growing infrastructure services providers, with interests spanning energy, rail, and highways. The company employs over 1,100 people and its orderbook exceeds £1.1 billion. Its teams deliver infrastructure projects across multiple regions, each with their own social value commitments and reporting requirements.
But like many fast-growing contractors delivering social value across multiple sites, the challenge isn’t commitment. It’s consistency.
We caught up with Stuart Culley, who heads up social value at Aureos, to hear how his team manages the messy reality of tracking and reporting social value at that kind of scale, and where Thrive fits into the picture.
Delivering Consistent Social Value Across Rail, Highways and Energy
Anyone who’s ever run social value for a big, multi-site organisation knows the feeling. There’s always more to do than people to do it. Stuart’s core team at Aureos is no exception. And the business they’re covering stretches across highways, rail, and energy – sectors at very different stages of social value maturity.
National Highways work comes with structured targets and formal reporting. But in other corners, especially where Aureos operates as a Tier 2 supplier, obligations are far less well-defined.
So Stuart’s team has built out a network of “social value hubs”: volunteer champions dotted across each region of the business, who pick up activities like school visits, charity partnerships, and STEM outreach on top of their regular roles.
“We will often be parachuted into an area for a short period of time and be expected to deliver against a series of targets. One of the biggest challenges we have is actually getting to know the local area and what can have meaningful impact.”
Moreover, the people doing the actual social value work on the ground aren’t always the same people feeding data back into the system.
In practice, this creates a gap between activity happening on site and the evidence that eventually gets reported.
The gap between doing and recording is one Stuart comes back to again and again. It’s a challenge with competing demands for certainty on programme, margin, and deadline, which is not always in line with delivering meaningful community impact.
“It can be tough to balance community impact with the day‑to‑day pressures of delivery, deadlines, and making the business work. That’s why we really need people who genuinely care about our communities to speak up and make sure local voices shape how we build a more sustainable future.”
If you work in social value – whether that’s in construction, tech, professional services, or real estate – none of this will surprise you.
Across large organisations, the difficulty is rarely deciding to deliver social value. It’s capturing consistent, credible data from a dispersed workforce who could be anywhere!
It’s precisely why the platform you use matters as much as the strategy behind it. If the tool is too fiddly for non-specialists, the data just doesn’t materialise.
One Source of Truth, Multiple Audiences
Thrive acts as Aureos’s single internal source of truth for social value reporting.
Dashboards, board packs, investor summaries and bid evidence — it all lives in one place.
For a business operating across multiple infrastructure sectors, having one trusted dataset underneath all reporting becomes essential.
“Having everything captured in Thrive means we can show clients and internal stakeholders exactly what we’ve delivered, with credible evidence behind it.”
That’s not a trivial point when stakeholders demand the same rigour from your ESG data as it does from your financials.
And that’s not all, one client may want their data presented in one format. Another client insists on a completely different framework. A third has its own bespoke reporting platform.
Same data, re-keyed and reshaped two or three times over.
“Our clients will often require bespoke reporting across a number of different platforms. That can cause challenges in terms of double or sometimes triple handling the same data.”
What saves the whole thing from becoming completely unworkable is having that one authoritative dataset underneath all that reporting.
That way, the same delivery data can be reused across internal reporting, client frameworks, and bid submissions without being rebuilt each time.
Because Thrive incorporates the Impact Evaluation Standard, with economically grounded proxy values aligned to the Social Value Model, Aureos can generate defensible figures regardless of which client template the data ultimately has to fit.
For Aureos, that means the same underlying delivery data can support board reporting, client updates, investor conversations, and bid submissions.
Thrive Dashboard Helps Work Winning
Ask Stuart where Thrive makes the biggest practical difference and he’ll point straight at work-winning.
When bids are being assembled, teams need credible evidence quickly.
He gets pulled into bids regularly, and the headline dashboard is his go-to — a quick way to surface hard evidence of what Aureos has actually delivered.
“Thrive’s headline dashboard reporting is very useful for work-winning purposes — producing those clear evidence points that can go into our bids and our tenders.”
This ability to demonstrate a credible delivery track record at the click of a button is a genuine edge when it comes to creating bids. And this isn’t unique to construction. If you’re bidding for public sector contracts in any sector and your social value evidence is scattered across spreadsheets and old emails, you’re on the back foot before you’ve written a word.
Starting With What The Community Actually Needs
Aureos makes a point of identifying local needs and consulting communities before putting together a social value offer. There’s a proper process: talking to client teams, local authorities, and councils, alongside desk research using government health data and deprivation indices.
Then the team works out where Aureos’s particular strengths (prison engagement, STEM outreach with schools and universities, armed forces support through the recently signed Armed Forces Covenant, local supplier and SME development) can do the most good in that specific place.
That’s exactly the kind of place-based thinking the Social Value Model and PPN 002 are pushing for, and that PPN 026 will promote. For infrastructure suppliers delivering public sector contracts, demonstrating this kind of locally grounded impact is increasingly expected.
Continuing Social Value Success from Keltbray to Aureos
When Aureos split off as an independent business, Stuart’s team could have gone with any platform on the market.
Despite already using Thrive at Keltbray, they looked around, benchmarked the options, and came back to Thrive.
All of Aureos’s historical social value data was already sitting there. Staying meant they could measure current performance against existing baselines from day one with no migration headaches, and no gaps in the timeline.
When you need to show investors and clients a credible evidenced track record immediately, that kind of continuity isn’t something you throw away lightly.
But ease of use mattered just as much. Remember, Stuart’s relying on volunteer champions and other data collectors across multiple offices and sites to actually get data into the system. If the platform puts up barriers, people simply won’t bother.
“Thrive is straightforward for teams across the business to use and doesn’t require a huge amount of training, but it generates powerful data in a clear, user-friendly format.”
There’s a regulatory dimension too. Growing awareness of the Procurement Act is pulling more colleagues into the social value conversation. Thrive and the Impact Evaluation Standard have kept step with those shifts, incorporating PPN 002 and the 2025 Social Value Model. That means users aren’t left scrambling to overhaul their measurement approach every time the goalposts move.
“We are very rapidly starting to compete with other major competitors. It’s a fast journey. And having tools like Thrive that we’re familiar with, that we’re able to use — it’s been valuable to us.”
What’s Next for Aureos and Thrive
Aureos has a broader sustainability strategy in the pipeline, with targets that reach into equality, diversity, and inclusion. The message is clear enough: social value here isn’t a box to tick and forget about. It’s a long-term commitment that has to keep pace with a business whose commercial ambitions are moving fast. Thrive’s monthly monitoring gives Stuart’s team a way to track progress against those targets over time, building an evidence base that gets stronger with every cycle.
If any of Stuart’s challenges sound familiar – team size, the dispersed workforce, clients who all want data served up differently, colleagues who haven’t quite got the memo – you’re not alone. Those problems don’t vanish. But with a platform that’s easy to use, keeps up with regulatory change, and turns a sprawl of activities into credible, comparable numbers? They get a lot more manageable.
At Thrive we specialise in helping organisations track, measure, and amplify their social value. If you want to discover how you can measure your social value more effectively and report to stakeholders quickly, don’t hesitate to contact us.