From Weighting to Worth: Why Social Value Is Won or Lost After the Contract Is Awarded

Estimated reading time: 11 minutes

Social value is now firmly established in public procurement, with weightings, evaluation criteria and a minimum 10% score. But what happens after the contract is signed?

At Westminster Insight’s Social Value in Procurement Conference, Thrive’s Danielle Aberg and Michelle Cole argued that social value is won or lost in delivery, not at the bid stage.

Drawing on almost forty years of combined experience, they set out why commitments drift after award, the five-stage delivery cycle that keeps them alive, and the practical steps procurement teams, social value leads and department heads can take to turn scored promises into real outcomes.

The public sector has become good at scoring social value. Weightings are in place, evaluation criteria are established, and every bidder knows that a minimum of 10% of the score depends on it. Yet a growing body of evidence, and the day-to-day experience of practitioners on both sides of the contract, points to the same uncomfortable conclusion. The hard work of social value does not end at award. That is where it starts.

That was the argument Danni Aberg and Michelle Cole put to the room at Westminster Insight’s Social Value in Procurement Conference in London on 13 July, in a session titled “From Weighting to Worth: Why Social Value Is Won or Lost After the Contract Is Awarded”.

The two speakers know the territory from both sides:

• Danni Aberg, Head of Social Value at Thrive, has spent more than two decades in social value and social sustainability, including as Head of Social Sustainability at BAM, in CSR roles at the Construction Industry Training Board and Bouygues UK, and running her own consultancy advising clients including the Welsh Government
• Michelle Cole, Principal Social Value Consultant at Thrive, has built a career designing and evidencing social value on construction, housing and public sector programmes, with a particular focus on opening opportunities to people excluded from traditional pathways

“We’ve become really good at scoring social value, at raising its profile in procurement, and at making sure it’s duly considered in how we contract public spending,” Danni told the conference. “But sometimes, more often than I’d like to admit, it stops there.”

The goal, she said, is to move social value beyond a contract commitment into something actively managed throughout the lifecycle of a contract, “and, more importantly, used to inform continued improvement and future decision-making, so that we’re actually creating sustainable value for taxpayers.”

The value that leaks away after signature

Michelle opened with a number that should give every commissioning authority pause. Research by WorldCC and Ironclad puts average contract value leakage at around 11% once a contract is signed. That figure covers commercial value as a whole, lost in delivery, governance and management, and it applies to contracts where cost and legal teams are actively watching, with people whose job it is to chase value down.

Social value receives nowhere near that level of scrutiny, Michelle argued, so it is fair to assume the real figure for social value is higher.

Editorial note — The scale is easy to underestimate. On a £10 million contract, 11% leakage is £1.1 million of value slipping away after signature — the sort of sum that, on the cost line, would trigger immediate scrutiny and a recovery plan. Held to the same discipline, social value becomes something a finance team or accounting officer can defend, cost and budget for, rather than a soft promise.

From promise to advocacy: where social value leaks away across the contract lifecycle. Slide from Thrive’s presentation at Westminster Insight’s Social Value Conference, July 2026.

The pattern behind the leak is consistent, and it starts earlier than most people expect. Early market engagement often skips the social value conversation entirely. Tender requirements stay loose, with no demand for SMART, measurable commitments. Costed commitments get quietly dropped in negotiation. Then, after award, social value is left out of mobilisation, no reporting cadence is set, and drift goes unnoticed until it is too late to recover.

Two failures do most of the damage, Michelle suggested:

• Commitments are written in bid language and never translated into something a contract manager can pick up and run with day to day
• Ownership sits with whoever wrote the bid rather than whoever delivers the contract, so nobody is actually holding the commitments once delivery starts

It is not only commissioners who see the problem. Thrive regularly runs sessions with strategic suppliers, and when asked about the biggest barriers to social value delivery their answers are remarkably consistent. Two things come up every time:

• Insufficient early engagement before tender
• Lack of interest and engagement after award

Danni shared a story that made the cost of that disengagement concrete. On one five-year public contract, social value commitments were made at bid stage and then never once raised during delivery. The first time anyone asked about them was at the end of the contract, when the evidence was long gone and the opportunity with it.

Editorial note — For a public body, social value that quietly drifts is also a public-profile and scrutiny risk. Auditors, select committees, the media and the public increasingly ask what a contract actually delivered, not just what was promised at the bid — and evidence gathered during delivery, rather than reconstructed once it has ended, is what stands up to that scrutiny.

Treat social value the way you already treat cost and risk

The answer the pair set out is not a new framework so much as an old discipline applied to a new subject.

Every well-run contract already manages cost and risk through a familiar cycle: define, mobilise, manage, adapt, and feed lessons back into the next project.

Michelle emphasised that all of these systems already exist, but organisations are not applying them to social value instinctively and consistently.

The delivery cycle: five habits that turn a scored bid into lasting, shared impact. Slide from Thrive’s presentation at Westminster Insight’s Social Value Conference, July 2026.

Asked what good mobilisation looks like in practice, Michelle described four ingredients:

• A kick-off that includes, or is dedicated to, social value, rather than an afterthought bolted onto the main mobilisation meeting.
• Joint confirmation of commitments, expectations and timelines, with both parties in the room together.
• A live, jointly owned plan rather than a static document handed over once and filed away.
• Named owners for every commitment, agreed jointly rather than assigned unilaterally to whoever is left holding it.

That last point matters more than any other. Asked for the one thing that tells you whether social value will survive delivery, Michelle’s answer was simple: whether it already has named owners on both sides before delivery starts. If you know that, uou can usually tell within the first meeting, before anyone has looked at a KPI, she said.

When the cycle works, it’s down to partnership. The commitments that succeed are the ones where delivery is owned by both sides, rather than delivered by one and inspected by the other.

Getting heard when social value gets deprioritised

One frustration comes up constantly among social value leads, the panel noted: they do not feel heard, or empowered to push back, when social value slips down the agenda.

Michelle offered three answers, while being honest that this is hard, and often as much about organisational power as process:

• Evidence is leverage. A named owner, a standing agenda item and a documented decision trail give a social value lead something concrete to point to, rather than a feeling that something is being dropped.
• Build allies deliberately. Find whoever in procurement, legal or the programme office already gets it, and make them the advocate in rooms you cannot be in yourself.
• Speak their language. Do not assume colleagues will act because you believe it is the right thing to do. Translate social value into something that demonstrates value against their drivers, and position it as a commercial and reputational matter as well as an ethical one.

Michelle described one conversation with commercial leads where a social value manager had been battling for influence for months. Within fifteen minutes of a session that connected social value to what the commercial team actually cared about, they had become allies.

Practical moves for contract managers

For contracts new or in flight, the speakers pointed to a set of practical mechanisms that move social value into genuine, intentional management:

• Use a contract KPI for social value. It puts statutory requirements in plain sight, and while it may be more stick than carrot, it drives focus and elevates social value into the contract management process.
• Tie metrics to the supplier’s own reporting mechanisms, so data flows from systems that already exist rather than a parallel reporting exercise.
• Make social value a standing agenda item, and cover it early in the meeting rather than last, so it cannot be bumped when time runs short.
• Use evidenced change control. Commitments will need renegotiating at some point, because local need changes or a barrier to delivery appears. Discuss the change, document it along with the rationale, and you protect the value rather than quietly discounting it.

None of this is a novelty. Cost and quality already get this treatment on every significant contract. The argument is simply that social value should too.

Policy is moving in the same direction

This is no longer just good practice, but rather the direction of government policy:

• The Procurement Act 2023 requires contracts over £5 million to set at least three KPIs, published before award and assessed annually, and social value KPIs can count among them
• The Contract Management Playbook, published in March 2026, extends that accountability into mobilisation, delivery and exit, naming PPN 002 as a policy contract managers must track during delivery and calling for investment in proper tools and systems (NB this event took place before the release of PPN 026 and its new Social Value Model. PPN 002 remains valid for ongoing procurements and may be used in preference to PPN 026 until the end of December 2026. The position of PPN 026 vis a vis the Contract Management Playbook has yet to be clarified, by way of guidance scheduled for autumn 2026).

For a fuller picture of what the Playbook means for social value teams, see our explainer on the Contract Management Playbook, and our practical guide to social value KPIs from award to outcome.

The ‘Monday morning question’

Asked what the room should do differently on Monday morning, Michelle went back to the strongest indicator of success: make sure every live social value commitment has a named owner, on both sides. For organisations already doing that, the next lever is to tie social value performance to contract extension and renewal decisions. Most commissioners still do not use that lever, even though it is the one with real teeth.

Danni closed the session with the line that gave it its title.

“The weighting gets social value into the procurement. What happens after determines whether it creates any worth. That five-year contract didn’t fail because nobody cared. It failed because nobody put anything in place to make caring stick once the pressure of the tender was over. Define it properly. Mobilise it jointly. Manage it like you’d manage cost. Adapt it honestly when things change. And learn from it before you go round again.”

Continue the conversation

If your organisation is thinking about how to keep social value alive after award, whether that means setting workable KPIs, building a reporting rhythm with suppliers, or evidencing delivery for scrutiny, we would be glad to talk it through. Get in touch with the Thrive team, or explore how Thrive supports public sector social value reporting across the contract lifecycle.

Q&A: managing social value after contract award

Editorial note — Much of the social value at stake in delivery is inclusion and diversity outcome: the apprenticeships, training places and employment routes that open opportunities to people excluded from traditional pathways. These are among the commitments most easily lost when delivery goes unmanaged, and among the hardest to reconstruct after the fact. For related reading, see Thrive’s guidance on social value KPIs from award to outcome.