Social Sustainability: From Output to Impact

Thursday March 13 saw the first-ever Thrive Live webinar, and we’d like to thank the panellists – Verity Magee, Helen Longfils, and Vanessa Soames, plus our own Danielle Aberg – for a fascinating and thought-provoking hour!

If you’re one of the nearly 500 people who registered for the webinar in advance, you’ soon be sent a recording of the session. But if you didn’t or if you can’t wait, don’t worry! We’ve got you covered with this report of what went on. 

The big topics under discussion were:

• The evolution of social sustainability and social value to where they are today, and the next challenges the sectors are facing
• The skills needed by social sustainability professionals today and in the future, and what businesses need to do to secure them
• The panel’s initial reactions to PPN02
• The role of data in social sustainability

But before we get into those, let’s…

Meet the Panellists

Verity Magee (below, centre) is Group Social Sustainability Manager at Kier, a post she came to in 2022 after nearly ten years at Travis Perkins. She leads on the integration of social sustainability across all of Kier’s activities – including organising the Group’s first ever social sustainability conference in November 2024.

Helen Longfils (below, right) is Group Director of Social Value at Mitie. Before joining Mitie in 2024, she was the social value lead and director at Deloitte – with responsibility for defining and executing the company’s strategy and response to the Social Value Model.

Vanessa Soames (below, centre) is Social Value Director at Cognizant, with responsibility for the UK public sector and health divisions. Before taking up this role in September 2023, Vanessa was Cognizant’s Early Talent Director – a role she created. 

And you can find out more about our Head of Social Value Danni Aberg here. 

The Evolution of Social Sustainability and The Road Ahead

Summarising how social value developed into something that’s “built-in, not bolt-on” over the past fifteen years or so (something you can read about in more detail here), Danni asked the panel what they saw as the most significant shifts in practice and attitudes in that time. 

Everyone agreed that, for many businesses, it had been the gradual but deepening linkage of purpose and profit. At the start of this process, the approach was typically CSR-led, based on philanthropy or charity; with activities being separate from core commercial decisions. In this era, there was little structure or accountability. 

Purpose-led businesses have been making the changes at every level needed for “embedding social impact into commercial models” – as Helen put it, noting that this has also been driven by the growth of impact investment in recent years. 

More narrowly, Helen suggested that the Social Value Model has embedded social value into “everything you need to do to win work” – and that has been game changing for public sector because it made it possible for the first time for authorities to think about how to direct public money towards social objectives.

Verity agreed that far from being viewed as “the fluffy things that are nice to do”, social value programmes are now central to winning work. But she warned that many businesses still face challenges in making it understood that social sustainability – and delivering on commitments in a measurable, impactful way – is everyone’s responsibility. 

When a project doesn’t include a specific budget for social value delivery or is only scheduled for short-term work in an area, it can be much harder to plan and implement than on larger, longer projects. For that reason, Verity explained, Kier has created its own social value toolkit – so that individual project managers are empowered to go and deliver, whatever the resources at their disposal. 

What Kind of Social Sustainability Professionals Do We Need?

With social sustainability’s movement towards the centre of the business agenda has come a growing recognition of the great diversity of skills its practitioners require. 

Vanessa gave her list of what to look for in a great professional. They need to:

• Understand and be driven by purpose
• Be highly adaptable and exceptionally networked – because networks are key to finding those USPs that make winning bids stand out
• Be excellent communicators, able to get people to contribute to projects – even when there’s no dedicated budget available or when it’s outside their usual spheres (Vanessa pointed out that getting hold of the project KPIs required under PPN02 will be a prime example). Successful social sustainability professionals need to work alongside and communicate effectively with many people who have zero experience of sustainability
• Be commercially-minded, and able to think about what will create the biggest impact 

Finally, Vanessa stressed that there shouldn’t be a separation between those who write bids and those who deliver the projects. Acknowledging that this is a rare combination at the moment, Vanessa insisted that bid writers have to understand in detail exactly how the projects they describe are going to be delivered. Without that, they will lack credibility: “How to write the impact – that’s a skill in itself,” she warned. 

As for whether the time is right to start setting down standards and accreditations to address the well-known problem that many social sustainability professionals face – that of not having clear career pathways available – the panel was sceptical. 

All agreed that, with the current pace of change and the diversity of what the role entails, it is probably too early for formal “professionalisation”. 

Nevertheless, there is clearly a need for investment in learning and development opportunities that allow people to carve out their own career pathways through the many potential specialisms in the field – even if those careers are, in Verity’s words “squiggly” and involve sideways moves as much as more obviously upward ones. 

Those pathways are particularly important, because as Danni pointed out, more and more people are coming forward saying that they want to move into social sustainability from other careers because it’s something they really care about. 

Reactions to PPN02

NB This webinar took place in March 2025, shorty after PPN 002 was published. In August 2026, a new Social Value Model – PPN 026 – was released to supercede PPN 002 from January 2027.

It seems fair to say that the release of a new Social Value Model (PPN002) alongside the National Procurement Policy Statement (NPPS) just days before the Procurement Act 2023 came into force caught most people by surprise. 

But having had a few weeks to scrutinise it, the panel were largely encouraged by what they saw.

In particular, the panellists welcomed the attempts evident in the new Model to encourage businesses and contracting authorities to take a longer term view than they have to date:

• The removal of outdated sections, like the Covid-19 Recovery Theme, is a positive
• The greater consistency around Standard Reporting Metrics will help push progress towards project endpoints
• The requirement to publish and update project KPIs should really move the needle on making sure that impacts promised are delivered
• The focus on pre market engagement and recognition of local priorities will help expand the range of conversations that are taking place around social value
• The emphasis on collaboration and the development of long-term partnerships with charities and other organisations will help to shift social value benefits from being limited to individual contracts, and towards a focus on leveraging a business’s strengths and purpose across all of its activities

PPN02 encourages businesses to say “We’ve chosen an area, this is where we’re going to make an impact” (in Vanessa’s words) and that will really increases the incentives to work collaboratively and think long term, having open conversations with the market. 

The Power of Data

The final topic of discussion was the role data has played bringing social sustainability to maturity. 

Acknowledging that many practitioners see demands for data as taking them away from delivery and that nobody gets into social sustainability to sit in front of spreadsheets all day, Verity argued it should be seen as an integral part of the work. 

“We can’t see it as a burden – we have to see the opportunities in capturing this data”: and for that reason, Kier has introduced Responsible Business Balance Scorecards for all its projects, so that whether a project is doing the right thing can be viewed and assessed on the same level as asking whether it was completed on time and on budget. 

Picking up this thread of the comparability of social sustainability and financial data, Helen pointed out that real board-level scrutiny would elevate social sustainability from a nive-to-have to an essential. Looking further ahead, international standards – with professional auditing – would mean “social value is taken as seriously as profit”. 

If that were the case, long-termism and a commitment to data would be embedded at the heart of the practice – although Helen was quick to point out that it had taken financial accounting several hundred years to get to the point where it is today! Nevertheless, there is a lot that impact accounting can learn from examining that evolution to accelerate its own development. 

Summing Up

Before the panellists took questions from the audience, Danni asked each of them what the biggest single thing a business could do to show it was really serious about social sustainability. 

For Vanessa, it was a shift towards long-termism. For Verity, it was to stop getting “hung up on big social value numbers” and focus instead on real impact. And for Helen, it was deepening the ties between social sustainability and commercial success even further. 

Thanks to everyone who took part, who listened in, and who helped make this webinar happen. We hope this will be the first of many Thrive Live events, and we hope we’ll see plenty of you at the next one!