Simon Grove-White – Previewing the CCIN Social Value Toolkit: establishing a new ‘commons sense’ in procurement and commissioning
In local government circles, the term "Community Wealth Building" (CWB) has become shorthand for an ambitious agenda to rebuild local economies from the ground up. At the heart of that mission lies procurement—how councils spend their money. But despite policy advances like the Social Value Act, many are beginning to acknowledge a growing disconnect: the transformative potential is not being fully realised. The soon to be published CCIN Social Value Toolkit reframes how councils can use procurement not merely as a mechanism for securing additional, ad hoc social goods, but as a tool for building thriving, inclusive local economies. The toolkit challenges decades of market-first thinking and argues for a broader, more relational interpretation of what it means to generate "value" in public service.
Simon Grove-White
Simon Grove-White has worked in and around UK local government for more than 15 years, in roles spanning Strategy and Communications, Research and Intelligence, Regeneration, Economic Development and Community Wealth Building, through a community-led partnership called Owned by Oxford. He is the Project Lead for the CCIN’s Social Value Toolkit and a freelancer working on a number of community wealth-building projects.
The Trouble with Social Value as We Know It
When the UK government passed the Public Services (Social Value) Act in 2012, the hope was that local authorities would begin to weigh the social, environmental, and economic benefits of contracts—not just the bottom line. Yet, more than a decade on, many practitioners find that the Act has failed to live up to its promise.
The problem lies in how social value is being operationalised. In many councils, it has become a box-ticking exercise—another item in a bureaucratic checklist that ultimately reinforces the status quo. Smaller, community-led suppliers are often edged out by larger corporations more adept at navigating complex procurement requirements.
This dynamic echoes the warnings of social critic Ivan Illich, who in his 1973 work Tools for Conviviality described how new tools can either empower people or entrench institutional control. Many councils, the Policy Lab argues, have become trapped in what he’d call a “radical monopoly” of social value: a system that consumes ever more resources and attention, whilst systematically undermining its original aims.
A Toolkit for Change
The Social Value Toolkit offers a way forward. Rather than viewing procurement as a rigid legal procedure, it presents it as a creative, collaborative process—what Illich might call a “tool for conviviality.” It invites CCIN member councils to reclaim the power they already hold: to define value in their own terms and to develop and embed shared goals across all stages of the commissioning cycle.
The toolkit is both philosophical and practical. It proposes that councils start by developing shared objectives with communities and local partners, then collaboratively identify ways to achieve those goals; and build assessments and governance that can steward this vision and adapt to changing circumstances. It urges councils to move beyond the narrow definitions of “Best Value” shaped by New Public Management (NPM)—a paradigm that has dominated public sector thinking since the 1980s—and instead define public benefit in terms of qualities, relationships, resilience, and long term local goals.
Legal Powers, Untapped Potential
One persistent barrier to innovation in public procurement is a risk averse approach to the procurement regulations. Many have experienced lawyers raising red flags when new ideas are discussed, citing anti-competition risks. But according to the lawyers who worked on the Policy Lab, this is a misreading of the powers at councils’ disposal.
There’s actually a lot of flexibility within the procurement regulations, and under the General Power of Competence local authorities can do anything an individual can—so long as it supports the public good, as understood through its corporate policies. This could include launching joint ventures, joining co-operatives, or setting up Public Commons Partnerships. The key is for councils to have a clear thread from their policy objectives, or local missions, through to decision making and the actions they take.
Drawing inspiration from the Cleveland Evergreen Cooperatives in the U.S.—and the more expansive model of Mondragon in Spain—the toolkit invites councils to consider playing a more active role in helping to establish new forms of social and economic cooperation. These needn’t just be service providers working to rigidly defined contracts and SLAs, but could be entirely new democratic entities with governance structures that reflect and respond to local priorities.
Real-World Innovation, Quietly Emerging
While these ideas may sound radical, the case studies in the toolkit show that they are already happening to great effect in places. Sometimes this is done through bold interpretation of the procurement rules. Alliance contracts, like the Plymouth Complex Needs Alliance, have helped rewire the adversarial relationships often found between providers and commissioners, and provided containing governance for partners to work towards shared aims within a ‘human learning system’.
Wigan Council have successfully rebuilt their homecare provision by engaging extensively to understand what was important to people, then assessing the suitability of providers on a set of relational imperatives (commitment to place, good employment conditions, open book accounting, willingness to work with and respond to communities) rather than speculative claims of future outputs. The procurement is conducted through an Ethical Provider Framework which has helped create one of the best homecare ecosystems in the country by most social value metrics. Value for money is assured by open book accounting and a demonstrable commitment to the common purpose, rather than the more limited commercial incentive of a winner-takes-all competition.
And sometimes best value might actually be achieved without a need for contracts or procurement. In Tameside, Cooperative Network Infrastructure allows councils to trade with private companies for mutual benefit—without the need for traditional contracts. They simply become members of the cooperative with the exchange taking place under its shared regulations, bypassing conventional procurement and public contracts altogether.
As Anthony Collins Solicitors have noted elsewhere, the very nature of a co-operative—focused on shared values and provisioning towards common goals—provides an ideal legal container for public-purpose partnerships. Yet such approaches remain outside the mainstream, often overshadowed by risk-averse interpretations of procurement law and deeply entrenched economic norms.
Moving Beyond the Five Pillars
Community wealth building is typically framed around five pillars: employment, land and assets, inclusive finance, plural ownership, and procurement. But focusing too narrowly on procurement as one siloed pillar, risks missing the bigger picture.
Too often, councils simply raise the percentage of “social value” in tender scoring criteria without exploring actions which could combine these pillars to contribute to bigger strategic goals. The toolkit challenges this approach, offering instead a vision where processes and decisions seek to leverage a wider range of resources, and set the right relational conditions to work towards complex social ends.
Toward a New Economics of the Common Good
As councils across the UK face growing complexity—fiscal pressures, rising inequality, climate crises—the case for a new kind of public service delivery grows stronger. Oxfordshire County Council’s recent exploration of a Doughnut Economics framework suggests one way forward, centring policy on the intersection of human wellbeing and planetary limits, and recognising the need to mobilise all sections of society to cooperate towards these shared goals.
While co-operatives are often intuitively understood as “values-driven” entities, this distinction isn’t always clearly recognised in policy. Another recent CCIN Policy Lab argues that the cooperative difference—trading for common good rather than private gain—must be more widely understood for it to take root in local government strategies. Doing so would provide councils with the legal and moral clarity they need to prioritise cooperation over competition in processes and decision-making.
Ultimately, the Social Value Toolkit offers hope in an era of change. It’s not just a technical manual; it’s a call to reimagine commissioning and procurement as a means of advancing democratic, relational, place-based economies. For the cooperative movement and for community wealth builders alike, it offers a blueprint for how councils can act boldly—and legally—to serve the common good.
Next steps and where can I find out more?
The toolkit will be available on the CCIN website following the launch.
The CCIN wants to ensure an ongoing legacy for all our policy labs and would love to hear your views on the support your council would need to implement these ideas. If you want to understand what opportunities your organisation could have or get involved in further work, please get in touch!
Acknowledgements
This article, and the toolkit itself, owes significant thanks to the contributions of a number of organisations including Anthony Collins Solicitors, Stone King, E3M, UCLan, UEL, Inner Circle Consulting, Outlandish, P3, CAG Oxfordshire, and officers from a wide range of councils, including Wigan Council, Manchester City Council, Birmingham City Council, Oxford City Council, Oxfordshire County Council, Kirklees Council, Rochdale Borough Council, Liverpool City Council, Hackney Council, and Westminster City Council.
