A social value strategy built to be delivered

How Enable Green designed, delivered and measured a social value programme for a mid-sized construction firm that was engaged in a public sector contracts for the first time.

Client Sector: Construction / built environment
Location: North West England
Services: Social value strategy, TOMs-aligned delivery plan, community engagement, monitoring & measurement framework
Duration: 12-month programme, then ongoing quarterly reporting

The challenge

The client had won their first public sector contract that carried social value scoring, but had no consistent way in planning, delivering, reporting social value. Each project team was making its own commitments without a clear pathway on delivery. The commitments that were made at bid stage were landing on site teams who hadn't been part of writing them and were under resourced in delivering and embedding them.

Our approach

Strategy: We started with a company-wide social value strategy rather than a project-by-project fix: a TOMs-aligned framework setting out what our client could credibly commit to across employment, local supply chain, community and environment, calibrated to the size and type of contract. This gave the bid team a shared starting point and a clearer understanding of delivery.

Delivery: We worked with project and client site teams to practically deliver social value commitments turn the strategy into practice: local hiring routes, school and college partnerships, a standing directory of local subcontractors and suppliers for spend, and a simple toolkit site managers could use to run community engagement without needing a social value specialist on every job.

Measurement: We built a single reporting framework so every contract fed into the same set of company-wide measures, tracked against the TOMs, with a dashboard our client’s bid team could pull evidence from for the next tender rather than starting evidence-gathering from zero each time.

What we delivered

• Strategy: A company-wide social value framework and TOMs measure that could be applied and leveraged for future projects.

• Delivery toolkit: Local hiring routes, a live local supplier directory, and a site-manager toolkit for community engagement.

• Measurement framework: A reporting cycle dashboard, rolling individual contract outcomes reflective of wider company deliverables.

• Capability building: Training for site managers so client teams embedded social value internally.

The impact

• 6 live contracts reporting into a single framework within the first year

• 34% of subcontract spend placed with local SMEs, up from no baseline previously tracked

• 48 local hires across all sites

• 100% of contracts reporting on the same measures, for the first time

In their words

"We used to write social value commitments and hope. Now we've got a framework that tells us what we can actually promise, and the evidence to back it up when a client asks." — Managing Director,

Building or fixing a social value programme?

Enable Green design social value strategy, build it into how projects actually run, and set up the measurement to prove it.