Lorraine Cox, Director of STAR Procurement and Chair of the National Social Value Taskforce

Written By Business Samtaler

What is STAR Procurement - what do you do?

I am the Director at STAR, we are a shared procurement service – owned by and serving six councils across the Greater Manchester region and two in the Liverpool City region, hosted by Trafford Council. We provide collaborative procurement for those six key councils and anything over £25,000 in contract value.

We procure, sometimes individually and sometimes collectively, to drive collaboration and value. We also work on commissions nationally for other public sector organisations. We have anywhere between 20 and 30 clients at any one time.

Councils, in particular, that may want a service review in procurement because they may be contemplating change and transformation. They may want help with creating a shared service or considering joining a shared service. And it's not just in procurement, we'll cover all aspects of the public sector in that regard. Clearly social value is one key area we offer advice, guidance or support on for public sector organisations.

Essentially, we are the public sector and we're here to help the public sector.

What is the Social Value Task Force?

The National Social Value Taskforce was set up in 2016. It is a coalition – a national voluntary group and we meet quarterly.

We try to explore different ways of working. We do a lot of sharing in terms of approach models. We look at different measurement tools. We look at things around social value maturity index to say, can we build tools that can help people to assess where they are on this journey, and to create an action plan? We look at things like targets and measures and performance.

We discuss how to align our focus in social value to actually make greater impact. Because it's okay, grabbing the tool and implementing it into your process. But ultimately, this is about impact. And I think unless social value is truly delivering impact to our residents and our businesses within our regions, then actually, you've got to question why you're doing it.

What is the purpose of social value?

As the public sector, we need to be thinking about what the purpose is of what we're trying to achieve. We have an absolute purpose-based role within our organisations to deliver

good for our communities. And I think what we need to do is realize that. Social value is not an add on.

We must be challenging our bidders to say, do you align with our values and our purposes? Do you consider yourself to be a socially responsible organisation? Are you ethical? Do you have good employment methods? Are you committed to net zero?

Our social value must be meaningful, and we shouldn't be spending any pennies with businesses that don't align with public purpose. That is where I want to move to. I would say from my own experiences that social value has become a little bit systemized, and what I want to do now is think about what we are trying to achieve. Ultimately, this is about outcomes and how we spend public money in the best way to create value that truly impacts on lives.

What will the new Procurement Act change?

The new Procurement Act changes the way the winner will be determined in public sector procurement exercises from the Most Economically Advantageous Tender (MEAT) to the Most Advantageous Tender (MAT). For me is there are many ways of procuring. Sandra Hamilton, a friend and researcher at Manchester university has written a paper on priceless procurement; if you fix the price, the price is the price.

So - why are we making people compete on price? We know what we've got to spend and we should let the market be innovative and creative and design how they're going to deliver to the price, so we then build in social value as a heavier weighting in order that we're getting socially committed and responsible organisations bidding.

There are methods that hopefully we're going to be testing to say, how do we do procurement differently? Because this isn't about the cheapest.

Do we want ethically sourced paper that's recycled and pay a couple of pence more because that saves the planet, or do we want to buy cheap just because we're balancing the budget? We have to look at it through a different lens.

Talk to us about the future of social value – will we still be using proxy values?

We need to think about what value means in terms of social value. At STAR, currently we use TOMS, we use the proxy values. It was helpful for me five years ago to sell this concept to chief officers and members because we could use a figure to demonstrate what we had achieved; we could say we had secured so-many-million pounds.

We encountered some confusion where people were asking if it was cash. No, it's not cash. It's added value.

So whilst it was incredibly helpful to move us forwards, where we are in STAR now, we want to be able to prove impact and show that there is an end result here in terms of a life changing, a life improving opportunity to our residents, our people, our communities, and how can we show that we're actually investing in our local businesses?

Ultimately SMEs, voluntary community, social enterprise sectors are the lifeblood of everything we do. We are going through a transition – asking if the proxy value really does prove impact. I'm not sure that it does, it may not be the way forward for STAR.

We will probably always use the proxy as it's useful to have that pound note value. But we need to look upstream and use data to define what the needs are for our communities and make sure that how we broker procurement is through a way that actually targets need in order that we can then evidence that the needs are being met.

Therefore, we are seeing impactful social value that is making a difference because otherwise, why are we doing it?

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