Efforts to generate greater social value from billions of pounds of public procurement in Wales risk becoming less effective if businesses are overwhelmed with complex measurement requirements, according to the Welsh Local Government Association.
Richard Dooner, Programme Manager at the WLGA, said social value was increasingly embedded within public procurement, but experience from councils suggested that trying to measure too many outcomes could become counterproductive.
Speaking to Business News Wales ahead of Procurex Wales in Cardiff on 11 November, he said the focus should increasingly be on a smaller number of meaningful measures that reflect the nature, size and potential impact of an individual contract.
Social value has become an increasingly important part of the procurement landscape as public bodies look beyond the immediate goods or services being purchased to consider what wider benefits public spending can generate.
Those benefits can include employment, apprenticeships, skills development, fair work, community initiatives and wider economic value.
Dooner said progress was being made across Wales, with social value increasingly becoming part of everyday procurement and contract delivery rather than something treated as a separate initiative.
Welsh Government is also working towards greater consistency around how social value is measured.
But Dooner said one of the lessons emerging from practical implementation was that greater measurement did not automatically mean greater impact. Creating a large portfolio of potential measures could overwhelm suppliers and make the process unnecessarily complicated.
Instead, he argued for a more proportionate approach.
A relatively small procurement project should not necessarily carry the same social-value requirements or measurement process as a major long-term public contract. The priority should be identifying the outcomes that are genuinely relevant to the procurement and concentrating on delivering and measuring those effectively.
The issue is particularly important for SMEs, where increasingly complex procurement and reporting requirements can create additional demands on businesses with limited resources.
Dooner said:
“Overcomplication doesn’t help. If you have a massive portfolio of measures, you’re almost overwhelming people with what they could potentially do. “I think having a small number of things which are meaningful to that procurement is really important.”
He said the approach also needed to be scalable, recognising the significant differences between individual public contracts.
Rather than attempting to demonstrate dozens of different social-value outcomes from every contract, the emerging message for buyers and suppliers could be simpler:
Identify what matters most, make it proportionate to the contract and ensure it can actually be delivered.
Richard Dooner talks about this and more in the special podcast episode, From Legislation to Real-World Impact: Is Procurement Changing in Wales?. Listen here:
