Guide
Social value is now a discipline of its own, not an appendix to sustainability. This guide covers how UK construction buyers score it, how measurement frameworks such as TOMs work, what separates a top-band answer from a policy statement, and how to keep commitments deliverable.
Social value is the additional benefit a contract generates for the community it is delivered in — jobs and training for local people, spend retained in the local economy and with smaller businesses, support for community organisations and schools, and environmental improvement beyond regulatory minimums.
The policy direction is established: public buyers are expected to consider wider benefit alongside cost, and central government procurement policy has set a minimum weighting for social value in its own competitions. The Procurement Act 2023's Most Advantageous Tender basis reinforces this by making it explicit that award need not default to lowest price.
For a bidder the practical consequence is narrow: social value is a scored criterion with a published weighting and band descriptors, and it is marked the same way every other criterion is marked. Treat it as a technical answer, not a values statement.
Most UK construction clients ask for commitments in measurable units rather than prose. The Themes, Outcomes and Measures (TOMs) framework is the most commonly encountered: it groups measures under themes such as local jobs, skills, supply chain, environment and community, and attaches a proxy financial value to each measure so bids can be compared on a common basis.
Buyers differ in how they use it. Some ask you to select measures and state quantities, then score the total proxy value. Some publish a required set of measures. Some ignore TOMs entirely and score a narrative against band descriptors. Some ask for a plan plus a commitment table. Read the ITT and answer in the format it asks for — a TOMs table submitted where a narrative was requested scores as a non-answer, and vice versa.
Where proxy values are scored, understand what drives the total: sustained employment and apprenticeship weeks typically carry far more proxy value than one-off volunteering days, so a bid stuffed with school visits can lose to one with two apprenticeships.
Across UK construction evaluations, high-scoring social value answers share five properties. Each maps to something an evaluator can tick.
The corresponding failure list is short and predictable: national statistics with no local hook, "we will endeavour to", volunteering hours with no beneficiary named, and a sustainability answer recycled into the social value box.
Where the ITT does not mandate a format, this order maps cleanly onto most band descriptors:
Keep the table inside the word or page limit. Where a limit exists, evidence that falls beyond it is routinely not read — put the numbers before the cut, not in an appendix.
Committed measures are frequently written into the contract and tracked as KPIs, and performance is increasingly visible through contract performance notices. Over-committing to win is therefore a two-stage mistake: it exposes you to under-delivery on this contract and weakens the evidence base for the next bid.
Practical control: before submission, have the intended project manager and the person who will actually recruit sign off every number in the commitment table. If neither will sign, the number does not go in.
TendersIQ UK reads your tender documents, rebuilds the published scoring framework, and marks your draft answers against it — criterion by criterion, with the quote that earned the band.
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