Meet Matt Richardson, Social Value Lead at The Growth Company. A social enterprise operating and supporting businesses across Greater Manchester and the North. We discussed diversity and inclusion and how employers can become more inclusive. He shares excellent advice that companies can adopt to make sure they are addressing barriers to employment.

Meet Jon Tabbush, Senior Researcher at Centre for London. They recently launched a new report titled ‘Property, Pensions and Procurement: Are Councils making the most of their community assets’. Exploring how community wealth-building-style programs have been working in London so far - How they can work better, how various stakeholders and experts are seeing that progress and whether or not they can improve them.

Suppose you’re the person facing the barrage of social value questions alone. You know what a difference getting this right could make for your company. If only you could get someone senior to focus on it long enough to be effective. We have two magic words for you: ‘Business Risk’.

We speak to Pheona and Micheal Matovu, Co-Founders of Radiant and Brighter, about how and why workplaces should diversify, how you know when you are 'diverse' enough, and why they remain optimistic about our ability to change.

Meet Carol Glenn, Social Value Programme Manager at Solihull Metropolitan Borough Council. We talk about perceptions of social value, challenges with measurement, and what makes some suppliers stand out with their social value story.

Today we're talking to Chris White, the MP behind the Social Value Act that began life in 2010. Find out why the legislation is so vague; what role Labour's Hazel Blears played; and how it almost didn't come to pass as a Private Members Bill. We also discussed how the Act might come into its own post-Brexit.

If you’re a private sector organisation, good social value is about thinking about how you operate and what non-economic value you can create for your own stakeholders as part of your operations. These stakeholders can be external customers, such as the communities you serve or the people living in the places where you operate, but they also include internal stakeholders - one of the most important groups of which is your staff.

Towards the end of 2020, the Ministry of Justice changed legislation to remove some ex-offenders employment barriers. Yet there is still a massive stigma around employing people with a criminal record; just 17% of ex-offenders manage to get a job within a year of release. If real change is going to happen, it needs to occur in the boardroom, not the courtroom.

Frank discusses how COVID-19 has uncovered the fragility of some supply chains, how buying from local businesses and social enterprises can help mitigate that risk, SAP's own approach to a more ethical supply chain and why he is hopeful that other large companies will follow suit.

It can be hard to move from talking about something to doing it, especially when you work for a large or complex organisation. Depending on your workplace culture and hierarchy, your passion and drive to create more social value might lead to frustration than action. But there are things that you can be doing, however small, that could influence genuine change.

Design a house that could be sold for less than £180,000 but still makes you a profit. Get innovative and imaginative with construction methods to keep costs down. Make it spacious, light, beautiful, high quality, sustainable and energy efficient. Make it a home people want to live in. Make affordability a selling point.

The public sector in Scotland spends around £11 billion each year buying everything it needs to run the country. Things like wheelie bins, medicines, fire alarms for buildings, paper for schools, hospital equipment, medicines and stationery. A glance at Public Contracts Scotland, where all public sector contracts are advertised, shows the thousands of goods and services bought daily.

That's a lot of spending power. What would happen if the public sector harnessed some of that power and used it to persuade its suppliers to commit to using their resources to improve the lives of the communities and customers their products serve?