Miss your social value KPIs now and you can be locked out of the next bid

If you bid for government work, you'll know social value as the section of the tender where you're asked what wider benefit you'll bring beyond the thing you're actually selling. Jobs, training, community stuff. Most people treat it as the bit you write last.

That's about to be a costly habit.

On Wednesday the Cabinet Office published PPN 026. A procurement policy note is an instruction to government buyers about how to run their tenders. Not a law, but departments have to follow it, so in practice it decides how your bid gets marked. This one replaces the entire social value model from 1 January 2027, and it's the biggest change to how bids are scored since 2020.

Most of the coverage got an important detail wrong.

The number everyone reported, and the one they didn't

The headline, off the back of Louise Haigh's interview with the FT, was that social value doubles from ten to twenty per cent of the score.

True, but only for contracts worth £5m or more. There's a second band underneath that almost nobody reported: contracts between £1m and £5m carry a minimum ten per cent weighting, which is what applies today. And below £1m the model doesn't apply at all.

Worth being clear what a weighting means in practice, because it's easy to underrate. Twenty per cent isn't a fifth of the paperwork. It's a fifth of the marks. On a competitive tender where the technical answers are broadly similar and the prices are within a few per cent of each other, that's routinely the section that decides who wins.

So if you bid in the £1m to £5m range, your number hasn't moved. What's changed is everything sitting behind it.

Fewer things to write about, which is harder not easier

The current model asks about a lot. Five government missions, eight policy outcomes underneath them, covering everything from net zero to community wellbeing. The government's own view was that this had become so broad it meant nothing, and that bigger suppliers with dedicated teams could work the system.

PPN 026 cuts it to two areas, Good Jobs and Skills, with six things you can be scored against between them: creating or keeping good jobs, working conditions, fair pay, training, helping people progress once they're in a role, and bringing new people into the industry. Net zero disappears as something you get marked on.

Here's the part that changes how you prepare. The buyer picks one of those two areas per tender. You're not writing a bit about everything and hoping something lands. You're writing one answer, in depth, worth up to a fifth of the score.

Fewer topics sounds easier. It isn't. There's nowhere for a thin answer to hide.

The bit that actually bites

This got about one line of coverage and it's the most important thing in the document.

On contracts of £5m and above, at least one of your social value promises has to become a KPI. That means a measurable target written into the contract, tracked while you deliver, published on the government's public procurement platform and reported at least once a year.

And if you miss it, that can be taken into account when government decides whether to exclude you from future tenders.

Read that again if you've been treating social value as a writing exercise. What you promise at bid stage now follows you around. It's the first serious attempt I've seen to close the gap between what suppliers write to win work and what they actually do afterwards.

Whether it works is a fair question. Six things to write about are no harder to exaggerate than eight, and narrowing the list doesn't stop anyone promising a training programme that never appears. The KPIs are what changes that, but only if departments actually chase them. Government has never been especially good at contract management. That's where this will live or die.

Two things the coverage blurred

This applies to central government only. Departments, agencies and their arm's length bodies. Councils, the NHS and devolved administrations can adopt it if they want, and don't have to. So if most of your pipeline is local government, this isn't your rulebook yet, though it usually filters down eventually.

And despite all the buy British framing, the model specifically says the criteria mustn't disadvantage suppliers from countries the UK has trade agreements with. Buyers are told to check whether international firms are likely to bid before choosing what to score. A buy British policy with a non-discrimination clause built into it. That's what the law requires, and it'll still surprise people.

What to do between now and January

Detailed guidance lands in the autumn, and honestly it matters more than the policy note itself. The specific sub-criteria, the metrics you'll report against, the list of approved community programmes are all in that document. Everything you'll be scored on in practice comes later.

Which means the work right now isn't writing anything. It's working out what you can actually evidence.

Not what you intend to do. What you've already done, with numbers attached. Roles you created and where they were. Whether you pay above the legal minimum. Apprenticeships, placements, people you took on who were struggling to find work. If you can't point to it having happened, it won't survive an evaluator who now has a shorter list to compare you against.

That evidence takes months to build and about ten minutes to see through if it's thin.

The model this replaces only became mandatory last October. If you rebuilt your social value answers last autumn, you're doing it again. Third model in six years.