Six ways fragmented systems are costing the social value economy
Social value policy in the UK has set the direction. But it has not yet created an effective way to deliver it.
The weightings are in place, the legislation is in force, and public contracts are expected to create additional value for communities. Yet many communities still see little benefit. There is plenty of activity, administration and individual success stories, but not enough systematic impact. It is time to ask whether what reaches communities bears any sensible relationship to the value of the contracts generating it.
One major reason is that the infrastructure underneath social value was never properly built. Thousands of organisations are expected to deliver this value, but there is no common way for them to be found, coordinated and evidenced without each buyer creating its own solution. Every authority that takes social value seriously has made, or is considering, the perfectly reasonable decision to put a system in place. But repeat that decision hundreds of times across councils, combined authorities, NHS bodies, housing associations and central government departments, and we end up with something nobody deliberately designed: a national landscape of separate portals that do not speak to each other.
The cost does not appear neatly on anyone’s budget. It is paid in staff time, duplicated work, restricted access and partnerships that never happen. Here are six ways this fragmentation shows up.
1. Suppliers sign into everything but see nothing as a whole
A facilities management company holding contracts with 30 authorities does not have one social value function. In practice, it can have 30: different portals, logins, local criteria, reporting templates and taxonomies describing broadly similar outcomes.
The work does not necessarily become easier with repetition because very little carries across. A partnership created for one contract may be invisible when the same supplier bids two miles away. Bid and social value teams spend valuable time repeatedly finding partners and navigating separate systems instead of managing social value strategically.
VCSE activity also does not stop at council boundaries. Many organisations work across several local authority, combined authority, NHS and housing association areas, yet may be absent from the individual directories suppliers are expected to use.
Most importantly, suppliers struggle to see their own activity as one picture. If evidence sits across dozens of systems they do not control, producing a coherent national view for senior management becomes unnecessarily difficult.
2. The charity has to be found again and again
Every separate portal creates another front door for the VCSE sector.
A youth employability organisation working across four local authority areas may have to register four times, upload the same safeguarding, insurance and governance information four times, describe the same projects and beneficiaries in different formats, and monitor several separate opportunity feeds.
Each request may seem reasonable in isolation. Together, they can become a part-time job for organisations that often do not have a spare part-time employee.
Worse still, being visible in one buyer’s system does not make an organisation visible to suppliers working through another.
3. Fragmentation selects organisations for the wrong reason
This is one of the least discussed consequences.
Consider a national charity delivering mental health support across 60 local authority areas, or a regional infrastructure organisation operating across an entire combined authority. Maintaining dozens of profiles, systems, opportunity feeds and reporting processes is difficult to justify.
Some organisations therefore join only a handful of platforms, while others do not join at all.
The unintended result is that fragmented systems can select organisations according to their capacity to maintain multiple platforms rather than their quality, local knowledge or ability to deliver impact.
The organisations capable of delivering social value at scale may therefore be absent from some of the very places where that value is being commissioned.
4. Nobody can see the full resource picture
Social value usually arrives as a contract-specific resource. A supplier makes commitments against a contract and delivers them during its term. Funding, in-kind donations, volunteering and professional support are therefore linked to individual agreements and reporting requirements.
For a charity, those resources can arrive in disconnected pieces from suppliers with whom it previously had no relationship. Longer-term funding may sit somewhere else entirely through grants, trusts and foundations.
The result is that nobody has a complete picture.
The VCSE cannot easily plan its resources strategically. The council may not know that an organisation receiving one of its grants is also receiving resources through its supply chain. And the supplier may not know whether its contribution fills a genuine gap or duplicates something already happening.
5. Procurement and grant-making are separated when they should be connected
Many councils and other public bodies are doing two things simultaneously: generating social value through procurement and distributing community grants.
Often these resources support the same organisations, neighbourhoods and strategic priorities. Yet they are managed by different teams, through different systems, against different criteria and with different reporting structures.
This can concentrate resources around organisations that are already visible while worthwhile interventions remain undiscovered. It also prevents the authority from seeing clearly what its combined investment is achieving in a particular community.
Procurement-related social value and grant funding may come from different mechanisms, but both ultimately represent resources being invested to create better outcomes. They should be capable of being understood together.
6. The burden falls where there is least capacity
Fragmentation has a real cost.
Suppliers absorb duplicated bid writing, partner searches and reporting. Public sector officers spend time coordinating separate processes and systems. Ultimately, some of those costs find their way back into public contracts.
But the greatest relative burden can fall on small VCSEs. A charity with four employees may face much the same registration and reporting requirements per portal as an organisation with 400 employees.
Every hour spent repeatedly maintaining profiles, completing administration and navigating systems is an hour that cannot be spent delivering services to communities.
The cost is substantial but difficult to see because no single organisation carries all of it.
What would a connected system look like?
This is not an argument for centralising social value decision-making. Local priorities should remain local. What matters in Caerphilly will not necessarily be what matters in Cumbria.
But we can separate two things that have become unnecessarily intertwined: the supply side can be national while priorities and criteria remain local.
A VCSE organisation should be able to register once, verify itself once and describe its projects, beneficiaries, resource needs and geographical reach once. Public sector buyers and suppliers can then apply their own local priorities and contract-specific criteria to that common ecosystem.
The same principle applies to evidence. A standardised qualitative impact report, completed by the organisation delivering the work, can travel with the partnership rather than being recreated for every portal. Buyers can see what happened at grassroots level and understand the outcomes and impact for residents, while suppliers can build a coherent evidence base across their contracts.
That also allows procurement and grant-making to operate alongside each other as parts of a broader regional or corporate strategy rather than as disconnected activities.
The conversation we need to have
whatimpact is both a social value partnership management platform and a think tank.
Good social value strategy starts with high-quality evidence about needs and common challenges, but it must also recognise local circumstances, deprivation, existing strengths and community ecosystems.
The question is not simply how to implement national policy locally. It is how to combine policy, data, social science, community expertise and cross-sector collaboration while ensuring organisations have a fair opportunity to participate.
That is what the VCSE Value Forum is designed to explore.
On 24 November, we are bringing together buyers, government suppliers, VCSEs, schools and infrastructure organisations from across the North of England to examine where coordination breaks down, what fragmentation costs, which challenges are shared, which solutions need to remain local, and how the experience and knowledge of communities can play a much greater role in shaping social value.
If you commission social value, deliver it or receive it, join the conversation.
