How much social value can the industry actually deliver, by ISG’s head of social value
ISG's head of social value, Dr Vicky Hutchinson, advises Building magazine on what makes social value truly deliverable.
01 April 2019
ISG’s head of social value, Dr Vicky Hutchinson, has advised Building magazine on what makes social value truly deliverable.
ISG has worked in partnership with the Social Profit Calculator to develop what we believe is the most comprehensive and accurate measure of recording social value for projects, both during construction and once facilities are fully operational.
This focuses on a wide range of deliverables and not simply the localisation of supply chains.
When we drilled down into the data it was clear that this one singular factor, above all others, had the most influential impact on maximising social value outcomes.
Our multi-faceted social value focus on training, apprenticeships, local engagement and CSR initiatives had delivered well – but to score those big economic benefits you have to hire locally based supply chain partners.
Now contractors fully understand the benefits of a localised supply chain, and we instinctively look to place our works packages regionally, but what happens if the subcontractors we need aren’t based locally?
We’re forced to extend the search area and we now know this has a significantly negative impact on the social value outcomes of our projects.
So, there’s an interesting dichotomy here – we’re often asked by our customers, many in the public sector, to maximise the social value of our projects, but are local authorities doing everything in their powers to attract those organisations that represent the biggest contributory factor to a successful outcome?
Vicky said: “If we are serious about driving the best social value outcomes from our projects, then we need to bring more rigour to the evaluation process, we need to understand and learn from the data that we generate and it’s clear that we can’t do this on our own.
“The challenge has been set – we just need the ambition and innovation to start a conversation about how we make a change that will bring significant legacy benefits for our communities.”
Follow the link to read the full article, ‘How much social value are we actually delivering?’, which can be found at building.co.uk. Please note the article may only be available for registered users.
