Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
Key Takeaways
- Clarity in social value procurement processes boosts supplier competitiveness and ensures better project outcomes.
- Commissioning authorities should address key questions about contract goals, reporting, and evaluation methods to enhance clarity.
- Using structured systems, like Thrive, standardises requirements and improves comparability, making it easier for suppliers to respond.
- Feedback after bid evaluation is crucial for supplier improvement and fostering trust in the procurement process.
- Establishing clear metrics and frameworks in social value procurement helps streamline reporting and audits.
Strengthening Social Value Procurement Through Clear Requirements
What is the most important reason why some public procurement projects successfully deliver social value benefits and others struggle?
Most procurement and social value teams we speak to agree: vagueness, uncertainty and hidden costs hamper impact.
It’s usually lack of clarity – not supplier indifference – that drives boilerplate bids, tick-box delivery and inconsistent reporting. That weakens competition quality and makes it harder to demonstrate value for money under the Most Advantageous Tender framework.
This blog sets out the key questions commissioning authorities should answer before, during and after procurement to create clarity for suppliers and strengthen social value strategy in practice.
What Exactly Are You Trying to Achieve on THIS Contract?
Vague social value asks in tenders frustrate suppliers and encourage conservative, unimaginative bids.
So how can procurement teams make what is needed as clear as possible?
- Develop and publish an organisational social value strategy that sets out long-term goals and priorities
- Carry out Preliminary Market Engagement to understand community needs and market capability, and to agree what’s a core deliverable vs additional. Use the findings to design more detailed, more achievable tenders.
- Use the Model Social Value Question from the Social Value Model to specify Policy Outcomes, Award Criteria, sub-criteria and Standard Reporting Metrics (SRMs), and the bid content you expect (plans, cohorts, evidence, etc).
- Make the arrangements for reporting, performance management, in-service contract revisions, and what is expected from the supplier over the contract lifetime clear and transparent from the outset
How Much Does Social Value Matter and What Does ‘Good’ Look Like?
PPN 002 mandates that social value considerations carry a weight of at least 10% in awarding in-scope contracts. PPN 026 raises this to 20% for contracts worth £5 million or more:
- If it counts for more, make this obvious
- It can only be less than 10% if Preliminary Market Engagement shows 10% would significantly reduce competition.
In order to explain what “good” looks like:
- Commissioning authorities should make their scoring methodologies and criteria for qualitative assessment of bids clear
- Spell out what an excellent answer will include and what won’t score
- Where a contract includes Social Value KPIs, explain the scoring thresholds, the possible consequences of underperformance, how Service Credits and Points will work, etc
- Draw attention to previous successful bids and projects, and explain the reasons why they were successful
How Will You Evaluate Quality, and Not Just Big Numbers?
One big change from PPN06/20 to PPN 002 is the exclusion of “quantity” as an evaluation factor: suppliers still state quantities as contractual commitments, but assessment is qualitative – scoring the method statement and implementation plan, not volumes.
As the Guide to the Social Value Model puts it: “users will ask suppliers to state quantities as commitments, but the assessment is qualitative—volumes are not evaluated.”
[NB Until autumn 2026, when the guidance to PPN 026 is released, it is not possible to say whether this provision will continue once that Model comes into force]
The purpose of this is to ensure that SMEs and VCSEs can compete on the same terms as bigger players. Increasing SME and VCSE participation in public contracts is an explicit goal of the National Procurement Policy Statement (NPPS).
Quality is, of course, notoriously difficult to measure and compare. But certain common factors should be taken account of:
- Credibility of the offer: detailed delivery plans, evidence of previous delivery and community engagement, and a clear focus on outcomes.
- Context-specificity: avoid one-size-fits-all proxies and multipliers; show how the approach reflects the project and the community it will serve.
Which Model and Metrics are You Using? And Can We Respond Consistently?
The tender should list the SRMs in use, and any other metrics agreed with bidders through Preliminary Market Engagement.
Suppliers should be given clear instructions on the measurement framework, definitions, templates, and evidence requirements.
This is where social value software is particularly helpful. Platforms often pair a measurement framework (eg National TOMs, the Impact Evaluation Standard, National Social Value Standard) with reporting, so suppliers can report in precisely the terms the commissioning authority has specified. Using a framework and platform together also reduces interpretation gaps and makes cross-contract aggregation easier.
What Will Reporting Look Like After Award?
Reporting is often time-consuming and confusing for suppliers, so anything that can be done to simplify it makes their lives easier.
Clarity in advance on what will be required, when, and in what form is key. But so too is taking friction out of the reporting process, by:
- Automating due date reminders and chasers
- Providing user-friendly forms rather than making suppliers navigate a complex interface
- Allowing data collectors to submit from their usual workplaces (eg on a site, over mobile, etc)
- Guiding users’ responses by providing evidence expectations and asking supplementary questions to elicit necessary detail
Will We Get Feedback and a Fair Chance Next Time?
A lack of post-award feedback is a longstanding complaint from suppliers. It’s understandable that overstretched teams may struggle to provide it in detail, but it hampers policy goals:
- It discourages new entrants, reducing supplier diversity and innovation in service delivery
- It reinforces scepticism about how open processes really are—again discouraging future participation
The Procurement Act 2023 improves this by entitling bidders to an “assessment summary” in competitive tenders (including how the bid scored against the award criteria) and by requiring bidder disclosure at the point of award.
These rights should reassure suppliers about fairness and help public bodies by guiding bidders towards better bids in the future.
How Thrive Helps You Create Clarity and Consistency with Suppliers
Thrive supports public bodies to structure, track and report social value in line with the Social Value Model and Standard Reporting Metrics. If you are reviewing how your organisation measures performance, publishes KPI data, or prepares for audit and scrutiny, we would be pleased to discuss how a more consistent approach could reduce risk and administrative burden. Our focus is on helping commercial and policy teams evidence delivery clearly and confidently across the contract lifecycle. Get in touch today.
Below, we summarise the questions above and show how structured systems reduce ambiguity, strengthen comparability and improve delivery.
Vague social value asks drive boilerplate bids. Define contract outcomes, constraints, reporting expectations and in-life management arrangements clearly from the outset. Thrive standardises commitments and evidence requirements so suppliers respond precisely and delivery remains consistent.
Unclear weighting and vague definitions of quality waste supplier effort and lead to inconsistent bids. Publish scoring methodology, thresholds and clear examples of what will and will not score. Thrive reinforces consistent metric definitions and structured evidence prompts, improving comparability across bids.
Over-emphasis on volumes risks unrealistic commitments and disadvantages smaller suppliers. Assess feasibility, delivery plans, governance and context alongside stated quantities. Thrive structures qualitative evidence so evaluation rewards credibility and meaningful impact, not scale alone.
Changing frameworks and templates creates inconsistency and unnecessary rework for suppliers. Specify the model, required metrics, definitions, templates and evidence expectations clearly from the outset. Thrive standardises metrics and workflows so reporting remains consistent and portfolio-level data can be compared with confidence.
Manual, fragmented reporting creates duplication and weak audit trails. Set clear data fields, reporting cadence and evidence expectations upfront. Thrive provides structured forms and automated reminders to ensure consistent, auditable data capture.
Opaque debriefs limit supplier improvement and undermine trust. Provide specific feedback, clear benchmarks and practical guidance for future bids. Thrive structures performance evidence so feedback is grounded in consistent, comparable data.
Alan Boyce
Senior Researcher More articles by Alan >
