Social Value Statement

Why this exists, and what it is not

Social value carries a minimum ten per cent weighting in central government procurement under PPN 06/20, and the NHS applies a minimum of ten per cent in its own procurements. It is not a tie-breaker; it is scored alongside price and quality, and a weak answer loses bids that were otherwise won.

This statement sets out what we commit to as a company. It is not a bid response. Every procurement asks us to map our commitments to the specific themes, policy outcomes and Model Award Criteria set out in its own invitation to tender, and the Social Value Model itself has been revised since its 2020 introduction — so check the version the buyer cites and map to that, rather than reusing this page verbatim.

The commitments below are deliberately modest and countable. We are a small and medium-sized enterprise (SME). A social value response promising more than an SME can deliver is easy to write, easy for an experienced evaluator to spot, and becomes a contractual obligation if it wins.

Tackling economic inequality

We are based in Basford, Nottingham, and we recruit locally. We commit to:

• Advertising every role publicly and locally, rather than filling positions through networks alone.
• Offering placements, apprenticeships or internships wherever we have a role a placement can genuinely be supervised in. We are approaching local education providers in Nottingham to arrange this and have not yet agreed a partnership, so we are not naming institutions or committing to a number per year until we can stand behind both.
• Paying every employee at or above the real Living Wage as set by the Living Wage Foundation.
• Directing supplier spend to UK small and medium-sized enterprises where a comparable service exists. In practice UK SMEs are the smaller share of what we spend, because the largest items are cloud infrastructure and software licences for which no SME equivalent exists. We would rather say that than publish a flattering figure: the commitment is real, and it bites on the spend where we actually have a choice.
• Paying suppliers within 14 days. Prompt payment is a genuine social value measure for a small supplier and is scored as one.

On new skills: the low-code platform we build is itself a route into technical work for people without a development background. Configuring datastores, forms and workflow is a skill that transfers, and we make our documentation and training available free to any customer's staff rather than charging for access to it.

Fighting climate change

We are preparing a Carbon Reduction Plan in the format PPN 06/21 and the NHS Net Zero Supplier Roadmap require. It is not published, because measuring the emissions baseline it needs comes before writing it and that measurement is not finished — and a plan of this kind is a signed declaration to a public body, so an estimated figure in it is worse than no plan. Ask us and we will tell you where it has got to. What we already do: remote-first working, rail over air, renewable electricity, hardware kept for its full useful life, and cloud regions chosen with carbon intensity taken into account.

There is a second, larger effect worth stating, because it is specific to what we do. Replacing a paper or spreadsheet-based process with a system — the work most of our customers engage us for — removes printing, physical filing, courier movements and site visits from that process. Where a customer wants it quantified for their own reporting we will work out the saving with them from their own volumes, rather than claiming a generic figure here.

Equal opportunity

Our Equality, Diversity and Inclusion policy covers recruitment, employment and working practices in full. Against this theme specifically, we commit to:

• Recruiting on demonstrated ability rather than on formal qualifications, which we do not require for technical roles.
• Flexible and remote working available to every employee from their first day, which is one of the few things a small employer can offer that materially widens the pool of people able to take the job.
• Making our own products accessible, and supporting customers in meeting their accessibility duties — see our accessibility statement. For a supplier of software to the public sector this is where most of our real equal-opportunity impact lies.
• Reporting on workforce composition where the numbers are large enough to be meaningful without identifying individuals. At our size they generally are not, and a percentage drawn from a workforce this small identifies people rather than describing them, so we will not publish one.

Wellbeing

• Flexible hours and remote working as standard, not as an exception granted on request.
• A stated expectation that people do not work outside their contracted hours, and that out-of-hours contact is limited to genuine incidents on supported systems.
• An employee assistance programme, giving every employee a confidential route to counselling and practical advice that does not go through their employer.
• A trained mental health first aider among the team, and a referral route to occupational health where someone needs more than that.
• One day of paid volunteering leave per employee per year.

A note on the Covid-19 recovery theme

The original 2020 Social Value Model opened with a Covid-19 recovery theme. Its weighting and its presence vary between buyers and between versions of the model. Where an invitation to tender still includes it, our response is drawn from the economic inequality and wellbeing commitments above rather than from a separate set — and we say so, rather than manufacturing a pandemic-recovery narrative six years on.

How we report against this

Where social value commitments form part of a contract we report against them at the frequency the contract specifies, using the buyer's own measurement framework — the TOMs framework where that is what is asked for, or the Social Value Model's reporting metrics where it is not.

Reviewed annually, and republished alongside our Carbon Reduction Plan once that is complete. Owner: David Hill.