Since its emergence in the procurement space over a decade ago, Social Value has flourished into a vital strategy for purpose-driven organisations to create positive, measurable impact.  

As the creators of the leading measurement standard, Social Value TOM System™, and partners of choice to numerous businesses and government organisations, Social Value Portal has had a unique vantage point on this remarkable growth.  

Our Social Value Insights Report 

Our 2024 Social Value Insights Report is the industry's first benchmarking analysis of its kind. Leveraging nearly a decade of proprietary data and expert surveys, it reveals several eye-opening trends: 

Growth, growth, growth 

Social Value has enjoyed steadily rising prominence since the Social Value Act 2012. However, our research reveals that this trend has skyrocketed by an incredible 650% since 2020, a period that saw a plethora of legislation making Social Value central to procurement and impact reporting.  

In our report, we dig into the numbers, including the total growth figure and the sectors seeing the swiftest growth.  

Delivery outstrips commitments 

Using the TOM System, Social Value Portal’s platform tracks both the Social Value being committed by organisations, and the actual Social Value ultimately delivered against those commitments. 

We wanted to see if organisations were keeping hitting their targets or falling short. The results of our analysis were hugely encouraging, showing that delivery is on average hitting and often exceeding commitments.  

We have even highlighted the most popular Measures within the TOM System – including £10 billion delivered by a single one! 

What does good look like?  

With years of robust Social Value reporting on our platform to interrogate, we have been able to discover how much Social Value is being delivered on average on a project-by-project basis in a range of contexts.  

For instance, our report highlights the industries delivering the most Social Value per contract. We have also found that smaller businesses, often assumed to have limited potential for Social Value delivery, on average generate more Social Value per project than their larger counterparts.  

How public sector buyers mainstreamed Social Value

With public sector procurement spend hitting £393 billion in 2022-2023, it’s clear that is a major opportunity to extract additional public benefits from the supply chain.  

Our data shows that the UK’s public sector’s collaboration with its suppliers has generated huge benefits to the public – with an impressive 20% Social Value-add relative to contract value. While this figure will vary depending on sector and industry, it is clear that Social Value has become core to procurement.  

And the top performing industry is… 

Our Social Value Insights Report provides a breakdown of the relative performance of different industries – finding a clear front-runner.  

Using data from our platform and analysis conducted by one of our key partners, we dig into the performance of this sector across 500 projects, several UK regions, and over £1bn worth of Social Value.  

Read the Social Value Insights Report today  

To gain exclusive access to all these unique findings and more, download your free copy of the 2024 Social Value Insights Report. It will arm with the most up-to-date insights so you can position yourself at the front of this accelerating agenda. 

Access the 2024 Social Value Insights Report below.