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Legal Framework for Social Value in Procurement and how to interpret the Procurement Act 2023

  • 15th Apr 2025

Sustainable procurement has been trailed in the UK for decades, especially from the early 2000s when the law around non-commercial considerations in the UK was relaxed in varying degrees by the Scottish, Welsh and UK Governments. Although the Public Contracts Regulations 2015 (“PCR 2015”) (the last iteration of rules in England to implement the EU procurement regime) have ceased to apply to any newly launched procurement activities of a council they provide a lot of good practice that a council can proactively adopt going forward.

Since the Finnish Buses case the ability of contracting authorities to build social and environmental characteristics throughout a procurement process has been relatively straightforward under EU law, aided by a succession of other cases in the EU and in the UK (especially Northern Ireland). It is the EU procurement framework and relevant case law that first explicitly permitted policy led procurement- and which underscored significant progress being made in Scotland and Wales, with their respective governments actively promoting intentional policy driven procurement. For this reason, the old law (which is not dissimilar to the regulations that remain extant in Scotland) is described at the back of this section in order that good lessons can still be drawn from it.

Before delving into the Procurement Act 2023 (“PA 2023”), to understand social value in procurement in England requires an appreciation of the Public Services (Social Value) Act 2012 (“Social Value Act”) which was drafted with the reference to the PCR 2015 but are now amended with the correct cross-references to the PA 2023.

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