A BLOG BY GILL ROBERTS
Original article published in PSBJ September edition
Gill Roberts, Senior Social Value Manager for Morgan Sindall Construction's North West team, suggests that rather than creating numbered targets, we should be targeting the outcomes, focusing on the 'why' to demonstrate the social value of projects.
Creating Social Value is a key objective within the construction industry, made more important by the onset of the Social Value Act introduced in 2012. This act requires all public sector organisations and their suppliers to look beyond the financial cost of a contract to consider how the services they commission and procure can improve the economic, social and environmental wellbeing of an area.
Despite this government drive and the support of well-intentioned project stakeholders, Social Value is a term that is still often banded lightly within construction. I believe that many in the industry still don’t fully understand its definition or intent, and that this is diminishing the potential of what we are all striving to achieve. To me, Social Value means making a real difference through regeneration - to enable communities that have suffered economic, social and environmental decline to be able to address important local issues. When managed and delivered with all project stakeholders working collaboratively to achieve common goals, this is something that the construction industry can do efficiently and effectively.
In my opinion, development of social value strategy should sit hand in glove with the procurement of main contractor, but the reality is that it often gets lost within the ‘numbers game’ nature of the bid marking process. The impact that can be made on communities through social initiatives and employment opportunities can often become diluted in a sea of tick boxes, stretch targets and percentages per pound.
We’re at a point where because of the sometimes unquantifiable nature of social value, bidders and clients alike are ignoring meaningful early engagement and outcomes which create real benefit to the local community.
There are often nearly 60 different social value initiatives on any given bid, and I’ve been guilty myself of being lured into ticking more boxes in an attempt to make our proposition more attractive.
For this reason, I think there needs to be a call to shift the onus towards pre-contract engagement with the community, council or local authority and to assess the needs of the area accurately and then look at what we can offer. It’s critical that all concerned understand that social value is not one-size-fits-all.
Don’t get me wrong, we’ve come a long way since the ‘old days’ where the idea of a Local Authority getting involved was unheard of, and social value, or CSR as it was known as then, was seen as a ‘nice to have’.
I do believe, however that we need more understanding that the social value criteria sought during the tender process must be appropriate and realistic for the project in question for it to have the greatest impact.
The contract for a recent project, for example, stipulated that the client wanted to employ a large number of local people who are long term unemployed and, in some cases, had never worked before. Construction by its nature is predominantly short-term work packages and in the large part not synonymous with long-term work opportunities job seekers require. This will not offer the long-term economic sustainability we want to deliver via our work.
It also ignores the ‘why’ of the initiative, forcing construction companies to push through ‘solutions’ that ignore the complexities that early engagement can reveal.
Another project stipulated a number of employment opportunities for disadvantaged construction beginners. When delivering to this objective, we found lots of people who were keen to work but weren’t quite work ready and needed many forms of additional support
We then had the chance to work with them over a long period of time to help them become work ready, raising confidence and the ability to find a job that would suit them more. It meant that we didn’t meet our ‘target quota’ but I left that project feeling we’d met a more pertinent objective. The definition of success desperately needs altering because without the back story that objective was deemed a failure.
We have the best results when the main contractor has been a partner of the client from a very early stage. As Social Value practitioners, we are able to review the local needs and then target outcomes that can align with the trades, programme and skill set.
Through this collaborative approach, we are able to set initial realistic targets which can be monitored throughout the project, and adapted as the goalposts change. Social Value is not a numbers game - it’s about the long-term outcomes, narrowing what you do, and doing it well rather than trying to meet every target and tick every box.
ENDS