THE SOCIAL VALUE GAP: COMMITTED AT FRAMEWORK, MISSING AT DELIVERY

The policy framework

Social value in UK public sector procurement has a clear legislative basis. The Public Services (Social Value) Act 2012 requires public authorities to consider how the services they procure might improve the economic, social, and environmental wellbeing of the area. Procurement Policy Note 06/20, issued in 2020, made social value evaluation mandatory for central government procurement, with a minimum 10% weighting in the evaluation. The Procurement Act 2023 embeds public benefit as one of the objectives of procurement. The policy intent is sound. Public money should deliver public benefit beyond the service itself. An FM contract that provides cleaning services to a hospital should also, where possible, create apprenticeships, support local employment, reduce carbon emissions, and engage with the community it serves. The question is not whether social value should be evaluated. It is whether the framework model evaluates it in a way that produces real outcomes or produces compliance prose that scores well and delivers nothing.

The geographic specificity problem

Framework appointments cover broad geographic and sectoral scopes. A supplier bidding for a CCS FM framework lot may be bidding for work across the entire United Kingdom. A supplier on an NHS SBS framework may be bidding for work across every NHS trust in England. A supplier on a regional framework like ESPO or YPO may be covering a multi county area. Social value commitments made at this level are necessarily generic. A supplier cannot commit to specific apprenticeships in a specific community before knowing which communities it will serve. It cannot commit to local SME subcontracting percentages before knowing which localities its contracts will operate in. It cannot commit to community engagement programmes before knowing which communities are relevant. The result is that social value responses at framework level consist of corporate social responsibility narratives: national apprenticeship programmes, company wide carbon reduction targets, portfolio level SME spend percentages. These are real initiatives. But they are not tied to specific contracts, specific locations, or specific communities. They are aggregate commitments that score well at framework evaluation and cannot be measured at call off delivery.

A supplier bidding for a national framework cannot commit to specific community outcomes before knowing which communities it will serve. The response becomes a description of corporate policy, not a promise of local impact.

The accountability vacuum

The framework model creates a structural separation between the organisation that evaluates social value and the organisation that manages the contract. The framework body, CCS or NHS SBS or ESPO, evaluates the supplier’s social value submission and awards the quality score. The buying authority, a specific NHS trust or local council or government department, awards the call off contract and manages its delivery. These are different organisations with different priorities and different visibility. The framework body has the social value submission and the score. The buying authority has the contract and the operational relationship. The social value commitments made at framework level are rarely transferred in full to the call off contract. The call off specification may reference social value in general terms, but the specific commitments, the apprenticeship numbers, the SME subcontracting percentages, the carbon targets, are often not written into the call off KPIs. The buying authority may not know what the supplier committed to at framework level. The framework body may not know what the supplier is delivering at call off level. The supplier sits between two organisations, neither of which has the full picture. The accountability for social value delivery falls into the gap between them.

The overcommitment incentive

The evaluation structure creates a rational incentive to overcommit. Social value is scored. Higher commitments produce higher scores. Suppliers that promise 100 apprenticeships score higher than suppliers that promise 20. Suppliers that commit to 30% local SME subcontracting score higher than those that commit to 15%. The evaluation rewards ambition, not realism. A supplier that submits conservative, deliverable social value commitments will be outscored by a supplier that submits ambitious, aspirational commitments. The conservative supplier may deliver everything it promised. The ambitious supplier may deliver a fraction. But the ambitious supplier got on the framework. The conservative supplier did not. This is not speculation. It is the logical consequence of a scoring system that rewards the size of the commitment without measuring the rate of delivery. Every supplier in the FM market understands this dynamic. The incentive is to promise the maximum that the evaluation panel will find credible, knowing that nobody will audit the outcome.

The evaluation rewards ambition, not realism. A supplier that promises conservatively and delivers fully will be outscored by a supplier that promises ambitiously and delivers partially. The scoring system selects for optimism.

The double counting problem

National FM providers operate across multiple frameworks simultaneously. A large provider may be on CCS, NHS SBS, ESPO, YPO, and Pagabo frameworks concurrently. Each framework requires social value commitments. Each framework scores those commitments independently. There is no centralised system that tracks whether the social value reported against one framework is the same social value reported against another. A provider that creates 50 apprenticeships as part of its national programme may report those same 50 apprenticeships against its CCS social value commitments, its NHS SBS commitments, its ESPO commitments, and its Pagabo commitments. The same apprenticeships are counted four times. The same carbon reduction is reported against multiple frameworks. The same community engagement hours appear in multiple submissions. Double counting is not necessarily deliberate deception. It reflects a structural reality: national providers deliver social value at a corporate level and report it at a framework level because that is what the reporting structure requires. But the aggregate picture, the total social value the public sector believes it is receiving from FM frameworks, is inflated by the double counting that the system permits and does not audit.

The TOMs framework and its limitations

The National TOMs (Themes, Outcomes, and Measures) framework, developed by the Social Value Portal, provides a standardised methodology for measuring social value in procurement. Many framework bodies reference TOMs in their evaluation methodology. Suppliers submit social value commitments using TOMs measures, which are then converted to proxy financial values to enable comparison across submissions. TOMs provides structure. It creates a common language for social value measurement. But it does not solve the accountability problem. TOMs measures what is committed at bid stage. It does not independently verify what is delivered at contract stage. The proxy financial values are estimates, not audited outcomes. And the conversion methodology, which assigns a monetary value to each social value measure, creates a gaming incentive: suppliers optimise their commitments to maximise the proxy value rather than to maximise community impact.

What the Procurement Act 2023 changes

The Procurement Act 2023 embeds public benefit as a procurement objective. It requires contracting authorities to have regard to the importance of delivering public benefit through procurement. It introduces transparency obligations that will require more detailed reporting of social value outcomes through the Central Digital Platform. These provisions strengthen the policy framework. Whether they close the accountability gap depends on implementation. If the Central Digital Platform requires reporting of social value delivery at call off level, linked to the commitments made at framework level, the gap between promise and delivery will become visible for the first time. If the reporting requirements remain at framework level, the same structural problems will persist under new legislation. The Procurement Act does not mandate independent verification of social value delivery. It relies on self reporting by contracting authorities and suppliers. Without independent verification, the accountability gap remains structural, regardless of the legislative framework around it.

What buyers and suppliers should do

The gap between the promise and the outcome

Social value in FM frameworks is a scoring exercise, not a delivery framework. The policy intent is clear: public money should deliver public benefit. The evaluation mechanism scores the commitment. The framework structure creates an accountability vacuum between the body that scores and the buyer that manages. The overcommitment incentive rewards ambition over realism. The double counting problem inflates the aggregate picture. And nobody is independently verifying the outcome. The social value gap is not a failure of policy. It is a failure of implementation within the framework model. Closing it requires connecting the score to the outcome: tracking delivery against commitment, at call off level, with independent verification. The next article moves from structural problems to the sector view: a like for like comparison of the five major framework bodies operating in UK FM. CCS, NHS SBS, ESPO, YPO, and Pagabo. How they differ. Where each adds value. And where each falls short.