Social value: what councils actually owe you, and what they do not

Three different rules get quoted as if they were one, and the difference decides whether social value is worth a tenth of your score or nothing at all. Which one applies depends entirely on who is buying.

If a council is buying

There is no mandatory weighting. What binds a council is the Public Services (Social Value) Act 2012, and the duty in it is narrower than most people assume. Before starting a procurement, the authority must consider:

• how what it is buying might improve the economic, social and environmental well-being of its area, and
• how, in running the process, it might act to secure that improvement.

Three things follow. It is a duty to consider, not to score. It applies to services contracts: services alone, or services bought together with goods or works. And it only bites at or above the main thresholds.

So a council that gives social value 20% of the score and one that gives it nothing are both complying. The only way to know which you are dealing with is to read the tender documents, where the weighting always is.

If central government is buying

Different rule, and it is a real number. PPN 002 applies to central government departments, their executive agencies and non-departmental public bodies, for above-threshold procurements started on or after 1 October 2025. Those bodies must apply a minimum 10% weighting, or an equivalent measurement, of the total score to social value.

Minimum. Plenty of departments go higher, and the tender documents will say. Note that councils are explicitly outside it. They may choose to adopt the same approach, and many do, but nothing requires them to.

What changes in January 2027

A new social value model, PPN 026, replaces the current one for procurements started on or after 1 January 2027. It is still central government only, and it changes the shape of the requirement:

• It only applies at £1m total contract value including VAT or above.
• Between £1m and £5m: a minimum 10% weighting.
• At £5m and above: a minimum 20% weighting.

If you are pricing a large central government bid that will start next year, that is the number to plan against. Below £1m the model stops applying at all, which is a change worth noticing, because it is the opposite direction from where most people assume this is going.

The duty that applies to everybody

Separately from all of the above, every contracting authority carrying out a covered procurement must have regard to the importance of “maximising public benefit”, and must have regard to the fact that small and medium-sized enterprises may face particular barriers to participation and consider whether those barriers can be removed or reduced.

That is not a weighting and you cannot score it. It is, occasionally, a reason to ask a buyer why a £60,000 contract requires £10m of insurance.

What to actually do about it

• Find the weighting before you write anything. It is in the tender documents, not in the notice. If it is 10% and you are 15% more expensive, the maths has already happened.
• Offer things you can evidence. Commitments made in a bid become contract terms, and performance against them can be published in a contract performance notice with your name on it.
• Be local and specific. The statutory duty is about the well-being of that authority’s area. A commitment to the area the council covers answers the duty; a national CSR policy does not.