Foreword

“Welcome to Gloucestershire County Council’s first Social Value Impact Report. While social value has always been a key element of what we do at GCC, in 2022 the Council passed its first Social Value Policy and we started working more consistently and proactively with suppliers to look at the community benefits they are delivering and encourage them to work more closely with us.  

Social value ties together many different themes that are essential to delivering inclusive economic growth and addressing the challenges that our residents are facing, from public health to employment and skills to climate change. 

We are starting to see a growing social value movement within Gloucestershire, bringing together the public, private and third sector in a spirit of genuine partnership working.  

Through this report, we want to celebrate the good work delivered by our suppliers and highlight that for our contracts to deliver best value, we must look at the wider impacts that can be achieved.” 

Grace Eccleston
Social Value Co-ordinator

"GCC’s social value ‘journey’ is firmly underway! We know that we still have much to do and many things to learn from so that we can maximise social value in our contracts for Gloucestershire residents and organisations. We are really pleased to see progress across our social value workstreams, the embedding of social value across a wide-range of Council contracts and the building of understanding of social value across commissioning, delivery, procurement and contract management teams within the authority. A key factor in this has been the recruitment and hard work of our Social Value Co-Ordinator and our Social Value Steering Group. This report is the first ‘snapshot’ of our Social Value work to date and is intended to demonstrate the progress we have made and provide a summary of the sorts of approaches we and our suppliers are taking."

Pete Carr,
Head of Employment and Skills 

Gloucestershire are leading the way - Social Value is at the heart of their procurement process and the results are really starting to show - nearly £100m in SV commitments is an incredible effort. Having helped hundreds of organisations embrace the power of positive business activities over the last decade, nothing pleases me more than seeing Public Bodies embrace the TOMs to unlock more opportunity for the people, economy and environment they serve. GCC have committed to delivering a place based approach in partnership with their supply chain, and we look forwards to seeing the impact grow over the next few years.

Guy Battle
CEO of Social Value Portal