Who's it for?
This guide focuses on the opportunity and potential of the suppliers of social value commitments. It is however useful to a wider audience, including those:
- with a general interest in digital inclusion and in social value
- in strategy and policy, both in public and private sector
- in businesses tendering for public sector contracts (supplier side)
- in public sector procurement interested in understanding the supplier perspective
Contents
- What SVCs are and how they fit with ESG and CSR
- Procurement process and priorities and how DI aligns with them
- How SVC bids are evaluated
- Our DI-specific framework for measuring their impact
- The view from two suppliers – both delivering long term DI programmes that include SVCs Capgemini and VMO2.
- Our conclusions and recommendations.
In summary
SVCs: a mechanism with real potential but there’s a long way to go
SVCs have significant potential - but potential and practice are not the same thing. On both the supplier and procurement side, barriers — siloed working, limited resource, insufficient leadership focus and patchy knowledge — are limiting what SVCs can actually deliver.
These are organisational and cultural barriers, and they can be addressed. Some organisations are making it work and the benefits for all involved are huge.
The measurement framework needs to work harder
The current focus on quantitative over qualitative measurement is a missed opportunity. Numbers matter, but they don't tell the whole story of impact. Digital inclusion is a long-chain, ripple-effect intervention — its benefits accrue over time, across households and communities, in ways that a headcount metric simply cannot capture.
We need to put time and thought into how we measure and value impact.
Digital inclusion needs to be named, not assumed in SVCs
Digital inclusion is not yet explicitly embedded in the 8 outcomes of PN002/25: it is assumed rather than named.. If it is not named, it can be overlooked. And if it is overlooked in a £434bn procurement system, that is a very large, missed opportunity indeed.
Cabinet Office and DSIT have an active role to play. Digital inclusion sits squarely at the intersection of both their remits, and this is precisely the kind of cross-government collaboration the missions agenda demands.
The symbiosis is real — and needs to be leveraged
ESG and CSR are familiar territory for most businesses. Social Value Commitments less so — and yet they are arguably the most powerful mechanism of the three. They are mandatory, contract-specific, and directly accountable.
Organisations that consciously align their ESG and CSR commitments with their SVCs compound their impact on digital inclusion in ways that none of the three mechanisms could achieve alone.That alignment also brings deep benefits to suppliers and procurers alike.
That alignment is not accidental. It has to be deliberate. For all stakeholders, it is an opportunity that is hiding in plain sight.
Socialise, engage and educate — at scale
Social Value Commitments in service of digital inclusion represent a significant and largely untapped opportunity — for government, for business and industry, for the VCSE sector, and for the communities they serve.
Awareness-raising, convening and capacity-building across all of these groups is not a follow-on activity. It is the work that makes everything else possible; it turns policy intent into practice, and practice into sustained, compounding impact for the communities who need it most.
