A Framework for Place-Based Social Value Delivery

The government’s consultation: Public Procurement: Growing British Industry, Jobs and Skills, is the latest effort to make procurement deliver broader value. What sets this agenda apart is its foundation in a new data infrastructure mandated by the Procurement Act 2023. For the first time, contracting authorities could be required to publish standardised information on social-value commitments and performance. This shift creates the potential for genuine accountability and learning across the £400 billion spent annually through public contracts.

Yet reporting alone will not improve outcomes. What matters now is not the volume of data that the government collects, but how it uses the data to learn which contracts, in which locations, actually achieve meaningful social outcomes. Without that capacity for interpretation, the new regime risks producing transparency without understanding: a compliance exercise rather than a driver of change.

The recent consultation offers a solution: it seeks to leverage the new data infrastructure of the Act, opening up an opportunity for authorities to operate within a common data framework that measures outcomes consistently, alongside a spatial framework that allows them to decide where those outcomes should occur.

The proposed reforms introduce the following:

• Mandatory weightings for jobs-and-skills criteria in major contracts.
• Common metrics for reporting results, enabling comparison across sectors and regions.
• Geographic flexibility, allowing authorities to target social value in their own area, at the supplier’s base, or at the place of contract performance.

This framework transforms geography from an administrative detail into a strategic variable. However, flexibility without guidance risks turning social value into another box-ticking exercise. This article presents a three-scenario framework to help authorities make evidence-based decisions about where social-value investments will have the greatest impact.

To make this new discretion work, authorities need a way to connect local conditions to delivery decisions. The framework below offers that starting point.

It helps authorities use data, such as information about skills, training capacity, and economic regeneration potential — to identify where investment will stick. These three factors together identify both need and absorptive capacity — where opportunities are most required and where they are most likely to succeed.

The framework identifies three delivery models:

1. Local Delivery: Where a region faces skills shortages and has active training infrastructure (such as colleges or apprenticeship providers), social value should be delivered locally. Procurement can connect local people to local jobs.
2. Supplier-Base Delivery: Where local training capacity is weak or absent, it’s better to channel jobs and skills delivery through the supplier’s base, where functioning training systems already exist. This avoids unrealistic local commitments and ensures genuine opportunities are created.
3. Place-of-Performance Delivery: Where projects span multiple regions or operate as corridor-based infrastructure projects, social value should be directed to the place of performance. Embedding training and apprenticeships in the delivery area ensures investment leaves behind lasting employment and skills, driving economic regeneration in communities along the route.

But how do we know which of these approaches actually creates social value? Even with a clear framework, authorities still face the harder task of understanding what works best in practice - which types of contracts, suppliers, and local conditions produce lasting jobs and skills outcomes. Until now, those insights have been anecdotal at best, trapped in spreadsheets or evaluation reports that never link up.

This is where the new data infrastructure matters. The Act and the government’s wider reforms finally create the possibility of learning from delivery at scale - connecting local diagnostics, contract performance, and future decision-making. The next section explores how this could work in practice: a data-led learning loop that turns individual contracts into collective evidence about what kinds of social-value investments succeed, and where.

The Act’s new KPI reporting regime combined with existing skills and employment data together make it possible to see how different social-value commitments perform in different places. Data on training capacity and employment success is reported by the Department for Education, Local Skills Improvement Plans, and Local Economic Partnerships.

This combination of reporting could power an ongoing cycle of learning and improvement by linking local diagnostics, contract performance, and future decision-making.

For example, if the data shows that construction apprenticeships succeed where FE colleges have spare capacity, future contracts can target those regions. Where local infrastructure is weak, the evidence might point to supplier-base delivery instead.

In this way, every contract becomes a feedback loop. Each KPI report adds to a shared evidence base and the goal moves from contract transparency to learning from delivery.

This is the workflow:

1. Diagnose – Use regional data to identify local skills needs and training capacity.
2. Deliver – Embed jobs-and-skills commitments in contracts using the framework (local, supplier base, or place of performance).
3. Measure – Track KPI results consistently through the new reporting requirements.
4. Learn – Compare outcomes across regions and sectors to identify what works best.
5. Update – Refine targeting criteria and delivery models based on what the evidence shows works best.

Over time, procurement shifts from reporting activity to understanding impact — from compliance to continuous improvement. Further, to manage the risk that the reports become overwhelming for authorities, data analytics or simple AI tools could help integrate datasets, spot patterns, and provide decision support at scale. This acts as decision support, not automation—keeping human judgment central while making evidence easier to access.

The Act and consultation create not just new reporting requirements, but the foundations of a learning system for social value. Performance data should not just record delivery, but guide collective problem-solving between buyers and suppliers—embedding learning into the fabric of contract relationships and turning procurement into a genuine tool for economic regeneration.

This proposed learning system transforms performance management from rule-following to continuous learning - enabling contracting authorities and suppliers to adapt together as evidence emerges. This is part of a wider shift in public procurement: from transactional contracting toward formal–relational contracting—using structured reporting and KPIs to build trust and enable collaboration between buyers and suppliers.

If government embraces this shift—using data not just to measure but to learn—procurement could finally become what policy has long promised: an adaptive system that builds public value through every contract.