Social Value in Stage 2
Alison Ball
In our December 2020 Social Value blog we highlighted the opportunity to boost social value in your Town Investment Plans. If you didn’t consider social value at the TIP stage, there is still plenty of opportunity to maximise social value in Stage 2 so that built environment investment can deliver value beyond capital cost to address the challenges towns face, from levelling up to climate change.
There are increasing drivers to articulate the wider benefits of public investment. The Green Book 2020 signalled that it is now vital that interventions both achieve government policy objectives and deliver social value for money – that interventions maximise the delivery of economic, social and environmental returns for UK society for every pound of public funds spent.
Before the Green Book review, net present social value was a concept that was promoted to quantify the costs and benefits that could be quantified and monetised. However, the newly updated Green Book now places less emphasis on the role of a benefit cost ratio in decision making, instead, putting more emphasis on a wider value for money assessment and the strategic case for investment. This demonstrates that social value is, therefore, holds greater importance to achieving a strong business case than ever before, whether it can quantified or not.
In the pursuit of a future of informed value-based decision making in the built environment, in late April 2021 the Construction Innovation Hub launched the pilot phase of its new resource, the Value Toolkit. This toolkit gives early implementers a chance to pilot a new approach to defining and measuring value in the built environment that will drive better social, environmental and economic outcomes from investment.
“A lack of consistency in how value-based decision-making is approached has led to substantial gaps developing between what organisations set out to achieve and what they end up delivering in the built environment sector. ”
For Towns the opportunity to look at projects through the lens of social value will enable an ability to describe the wider economic and social benefits that projects bring to stakeholders and communities. Whilst this approach does not wholly replace the traditional economic appraisal, it will help to explore and uncover some of the less quantifiable elements of projects, which are never-the-less important.
We have produced a guidance document setting out how towns can set out social outcomes in the Five Case business model associated with their Towns Fund projects.
If you wish to find out more about how to ensure your projects demonstrate good social value, you can request a one to one session with our Social Value experts through our Expert Drop-in Hour service.