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 company of TODO_HEADCOUNT people. A social value response promising more than a small company 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 TODO_SV_PLACEMENTS_PER_YEAR placements, apprenticeships or internships per year, in partnership with TODO_LOCAL_PARTNERS — Nottingham Trent University, the University of Nottingham and Nottingham College are the obvious partners and it is worth naming those we have actually spoken to.
• 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. Current proportion of spend with UK SMEs: TODO_SV_SME_SPEND_PCT.
• Paying suppliers within TODO_PAYMENT_DAYS 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

Our commitments and our measured footprint are set out in full in our Carbon Reduction Plan, and are not repeated here. In summary: 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 TODO_HEADCOUNT people they generally are not, and we will not publish percentages that describe two or three people.

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.
• TODO_WELLBEING_PROVISION — set out what is actually offered: employee assistance programme, mental health first aider, occupational health referral route, or an honest statement of what a company this size provides.
• TODO_VOLUNTEERING_DAYS days 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, alongside our Carbon Reduction Plan. Owner: TODO_RESPONSIBLE_DIRECTOR.