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.

Rebuilding trust amongst consumers about the construction sector’s ability to deliver on its promises is a wider and ongoing challenge, and until its addressed, it won’t matter how much social value construction projects create. Having said that, the problem isn’t that construction firms don’t want to do the right thing; they often don’t know what to do or how to do it well.

Here are ten practical ways that construction companies can create genuine value for society as well as build economic value for their company:

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.

From 1st January 2021, Social Value becomes mandatory in all Central Government procurement. This article will explore why the new model is so important and why private sector organisations should embrace it.

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.