Beyond the Bid: Moving Social Value into Live Contract Management

Estimated reading time: 14 minutes

For years, social value has been treated largely as a bid-stage discipline. Contracting authorities have built sophisticated systems for scoring what suppliers promise. Far less has gone into managing what suppliers actually deliver once the contract is signed.

The Procurement Act 2023, PPN 002 and the new Contract Management Playbook signal a reset that give central government both the mandate and the operating model to treat social value delivery with the same rigour as cost, time and quality across the life of a contract.

In this article, Danielle Aberg, Head of Social Sustainability at Thrive, sets out three practical shifts contracting authorities can make to move social value beyond the bid: design commitments so they can be managed, write KPIs that hold up under the new published rating scale, and build assurance in so the value claimed is value that can be defended.

By Danielle Aberg, Head of Social Value and Consulting at Thrive

For fifteen years, almost everything we’ve built in social value has lived in one place: the bid.

That’s where the weighting sits, where the scoring happens, where bid teams spend weeks landing exactly the right commitment in exactly the right words. Then the contract gets signed, and too often, most of that effort just stops.

I’ve spent my career on both sides of that line. Helping suppliers win the work. Helping authorities manage delivery.

The question I keep coming back to is this: how do we firmly move social value from something we promise, score and report, into something we actually manage?

We got good at scoring promises

Social value has been assuming a bigger and bigger role in public procurement. The Social Value Act gave us permission. The Model gave us structure. The weighting gave us visibility. The Procurement Act raised expectations. That progress is real.

But almost all of that energy landed on one moment: the bid.

We score, weight, moderate, test for credibility, compare one promise against another. We’ve become very good at scoring promises.

The trouble is, social value isn’t created in a tender response. It’s created afterwards.

When someone actually gets an apprenticeship. When a VCSE wins a contract package. When school engagement becomes a meaningful partnership between supplier and educator, not a thirty-minute assembly.

All of that happens after award, but that’s exactly where the sophisticated systems tend to go quiet. A quarterly report that may or may not be read or a spreadsheet somewhere.

Then the contract ends and someone scrambles to reconstruct what happened and tell a good story. Unless social value has a fixed place in the rhythm of the contract, someone has to fight to get it on the agenda.

The Contract Management Playbook gives an opening, not a fix

That’s the gap the new Contract Management Playbook speaks to. I’m not going to tell you a piece of guidance fixes everything, because it doesn’t. What the Playbook does is create an opening: a real permission structure for contract managers to treat social value the way we already treat everything else that matters in a contract – cost, risk, quality, health and safety. To put it on the same agenda, hold it to the same rhythm, and ask the same hard questions of it.

But that’s all it does. It opens the door. Whether social value actually walks through is down to how commissioners and contract managers respond. What follows are three practical shifts that, in my experience, matter most.

For a wider view of stronger post-award discipline, our earlier piece is a good companion read.

Shift 1: Design it so it can be managed

We often talk about contract management as if it begins the day the bid is won. But if social value is to be managed well, it has to be designed well, and that starts far earlier than handover.

By the time the ink is dry on an award, some of the biggest delivery risks are already baked in.

A vague commitment hands the contract manager ambiguity. A beautifully worded promise that nobody tested for deliverability hands them a problem dressed up as ambition.

None of that is the contract manager’s fault, but all of it becomes their problem.

The most useful change most organisations can make is to bring contract managers into the conversation before the requirement is locked. They’ve watched commitments meet reality. They know which promises deliver and which quietly unravel. And yet the typical sequence is back to front: we write the commitment, score it, award it, and then hand it to the person best placed to tell us whether it was ever deliverable! By then, the words are fixed.

Two light touchpoints capture most of the value:

• First, shaping the approach: too often the Social Value Model questions just get dropped into the tender as-is and left there. A contract manager who has delivered similar work knows which deliverables are realistic and how to structure questions so suppliers commit to something you can hold them to
• Second, preliminary market engagement: when suppliers push back on a target, knowing whether they’re trying to reduce stretch or flagging something real about deliverability is exactly where a contract manager’s experience lies

Here’s a real example. I’ve been involved in early engagement where the social value ask included an exceptionally high percentage of local spend within a thirty-mile radius.

Good intent: keep the value close to the place. But the suppliers were honest. That radius collided with the other things the contract was asking for. Modern methods of construction and offsite manufacturing, where the specialist capability often doesn’t sit within thirty miles. Stretching environmental targets, which narrow the supplier pool. And cost and quality held tight usually means a trusted supply chain, so pushing suppliers into new local ventures means risk and cost climb.

This wasn’t the market dodging ambition. It was the market showing that one well-meant commitment was colliding with multiple others. Surfacing those frictions early doesn’t mean throwing the social ambition in the bin. It means making an informed choice. Either way, you chose it. You didn’t trip over it eighteen months in.

All of this has to be proportionate: a quick manageability check on the small stuff, deeper engagement reserved for the strategic, social-value-heavy contracts. Capacity is a real challenge, and no one needs to tell me that.

But here’s the honest reality. World Commerce and Contracting (WorldCC) puts post-signature value leakage at around eleven percent of contract value, evaporating after the deal is done. It’s a choice about how we apportion scarce resource: a small, deliberate shift of contract management time to before award, to prevent far greater leakage later.

The pressure is always now and the payoff later, but it’s the more efficient decision. For a Department Head weighing where to put scarce budget, the trade-off is plain: a modest, predictable investment in capability before award, set against the open-ended cost of remediation, reputational damage and rerun procurements after — and the value, locally felt and credibly evidenced, that disciplined delivery actually unlocks.

Shift 2: “Deliver social value” is not a KPI

The second shift is the KPI. This is where social value either becomes manageable or stays a warm promise everyone likes and nobody can grip.

The Act doesn’t say social value has to be a KPI. It says you must set at least three KPIs the authority judges most material to the contract. Social value only goes on that public stage if you choose to put it there.

The Playbook and PPN 002 both push the same way: KPIs should track the outcomes that matter to the end user. If social value matters enough to weight at tender and score suppliers on, it’s hard to argue it isn’t material.

Leaving it off your three KPIs sends the opposite signal: that it mattered enough to win the bid but not enough to manage.

It won’t always make the top three, and that’s an honest call. If it isn’t on the published KPIs, it still has to sit below the headline as a contract metric that’s committed to, reported, managed.

You can only manage what’s been pinned down, and many commitments simply aren’t. Words without a target. No measure of success. No framing for evidence.

Here’s the contentious part: that’s not the supplier’s failing to fix. It’s the buyer’s.

A vague commitment only survives if the tender lets it. Buyers have the power to make vagueness impossible: structure the questions so suppliers commit to something measurable, set out what a manageable commitment looks like, tell them the form their answer has to take. Get that right at tender, and you don’t spend the next three years trying to manage a promise that was never pinned down.

So what does a good social value KPI look like?

Take a worked example. The KPI itself is a single, clear outcome: local skills and employment outcomes, measured as the share of that year’s profiled target achieved by eligible local residents. Notice what that buys you. It’s rated every year against what you expected that year, so you’re not waiting until contract end to find out how it went. A cumulative line runs underneath, so if a supplier slips a little in year one, you can see the drift early, while there’s still time to act. Not in a post-mortem three years too late.

Beneath the KPI sit the routes that roll up into the percentage: apprenticeships, T Levels, work experience, mentoring, each with an agreed term target. If one route stalls, the supplier can lean on others and the outcome still holds. You’re protecting the value, not policing the wording. That’s the difference between a KPI you can manage and a sentence you can’t.

The words “social value” published as a KPI in their own right (yes, I have seen this) name no outcome and pin down nothing.

A KPI built well also changes the value of your reporting. Instead of chasing data backwards into evidencing what already happened, you watch numbers land against profile, and the moment something slips, you can see it and act.

Our below guide walks through what the Procurement Act requires of published KPIs, including the four-point rating scale.

Shift 3: Can you defend it?

The third shift is less a technique than a direction: assurance.

For a long time, the question we asked of social value was: did you measure it? Increasingly, it’s: can you defend it?

The mature end of the market is already moving. They’re building the rigour in behind their claims, because they know the claim is only as good as the confidence sitting behind it.

This is about being able to say, with a straight face, that the value we reported was real. If we can stand behind our claims, we can be confident in what public procurement is delivering for the communities it serves. If we can’t, social value stays a nice story, not something we can mature from. And under the published rating regime, that story is no longer private: an Inadequate or Requires Improvement rating against a social value KPI is a named, public event tied to the contracting authority. Defensibility is no longer just an internal discipline; it is a reputational asset.

This is what the Contract Management Playbook is asking for, just applied to social value.

Good governance, proportionate systems, an outcomes-based approach, continuity through the life of the contract, collaboration between buyer and supplier. We don’t need a separate rulebook for social value. We need to manage it with the same discipline the Playbook already expects everywhere else. When we get that right, the relationship changes: both sides looking at the same picture, in real time, asking the same question: is this on track, and if not, what do we do about it?

When the structure is clear, a contract manager can see social value through the lens they already use for everything else: opportunity, risk, performance. They don’t need to become specialists.

To make it tangible, here’s the approach we take at Thrive.

Rather than waiting to check data at year-end, we built confidence into the data at the point of entry. A system doesn’t fix a broken process; a bad one just makes bad practice faster. A good one stops the problems arising in the first place.

Over a thousand validation rules sit in the software, flagging issues to the user while the answer is still in front of them. A duplicated claim. An overclaim. Evidence not attached. Something marked local when the postcode prefix doesn’t match. The issue gets caught there and then, so it never hardens into a claim that falls over later.

Across a contract, patterns emerge: which suppliers are consistently struggling with the same thing, where evidence keeps falling short, where to put your support. Instead of finding out at year-end that the data won’t stand up, you know in close to real time.

The point isn’t the software. It’s that the rigour sits in the right place: early, where it’s cheap to fix.

Beyond the Bid

For fifteen years, social value has lived at the bid. We got great at scoring promises but far less so at managing them. The Contract Management Playbook doesn’t fix that for us. It opens the door. What walks through is up to us.

The starting point is three questions, asked of every commitment that matters.

• Is it clear enough to manage?
• Is it reported early enough to act?
• Is it evidenced well enough to defend?

If you’re shaping your central government approach to PPN 026, PPN 002, or PPN 06/20 contract management and social value delivery , the Thrive team are ready to talk.

The future of social value isn’t bigger promises or better bid language. It’s credible delivery, managed live, evidenced well, and actually felt in the places it was meant to reach. It is felt in the apprenticeships completed, the VCSE and SME spend held to target, the local opportunities reaching under-represented groups, and the inclusion and diversity outcomes the department is publicly accountable for.

Policy creates the conditions. Contract management creates the value. And beyond the bid, that’s where the value actually lives.

This article is based on a presentation Danielle Aberg gave at Procurex England on 19 June 2026.