Introduction

Gloucestershire County Council is committed to making the most of all the county has to offer by improving the quality of life for communities, supporting businesses to be successful and making Gloucestershire an inviting place to live, work and visit. The council’s Building Back Better in Gloucestershire 2022-26 Strategy sets out nine long-term ambitions of the council, striving to make Gloucestershire a prosperous, inclusive, innovate and sustainable county.

We are increasingly recognising the importance of social value in achieving these ambitions and driving positive change.  Social value is an approach that seeks to secure additional social, economic and environmental benefits for local people and communities from everything the council does”. 

This means that, wherever possible, these additional benefits are incorporated into the commissioning and procurement process. On contracts or single purchases above a certain spend threshold (currently £177,897.50, excluding VAT), bidders are explicitly evaluated on what social value they can offer, encouraging contractors to lever in additional benefits, ranging from providing educational session to local schools to investing in charities protecting local wildlife.  Not only will this benefit individuals and communities, but it should ultimately, help to create a more sustainable and resilient Gloucestershire, with research suggesting that contracts with built-in social value generate, on average, 20% more value per contract without increasing cost (SVP, 2024).

This report looks at the impact of social value initiatives in Gloucestershire since the implementation of GCC’s Social Value Strategy in 2022. GCC work in collaboration with Social Value Portal (SVP) who provide a platform for recording social value activity by all our suppliers.  This data has been used to provide the basis for this report, and we have also asked suppliers to provide more in-depth case studies of social value initiatives they would like to showcase.

To date, GCC has secured almost £99 million of Social Value commitments on contracts since 2022 and has so far delivered almost £21.32 million, or 21.56% of this across 70+ projects.