UK Procurement · Social Value
How to write a Social Value response that scores: PPN 06/20 for UK SMEs
Social Value is the section UK SMEs lose the most points on. The frameworks reward specific, measurable, locally relevant commitments — and most bidders write generic corporate-citizenship copy instead. Here's what PPN 06/20 actually asks for, the five mistakes that keep costing you marks, and a worked example you can copy the structure of.
What PPN 06/20 actually is
PPN 06/20 is the Procurement Policy Note that introduced the Social Value Model. It's been mandatory on all central-government procurements since January 2021, and it's increasingly applied (with local variations) by NHS trusts, local authorities, and the wider public sector.
In practice, it means a minimum of 10% of your bid score is allocated to Social Value, and your response must be tied to one or more of nine specific outcomes — not to your generic CSR statement, your charity-of-the-year, or how many trees your office plants.
The 9 outcomes (and the 5 themes they roll into)
The Social Value Model groups its nine specific Model Award Criteria (MACs) into five themes:
- Theme 1 — COVID-19 recovery. Help local communities recover from the impact of the pandemic. (Less prominent now in 2026 bids, but still listed.)
- Theme 2 — Tackling economic inequality. Create new businesses, jobs, and skills (MAC 3.1); increase supply chain resilience and capacity (MAC 3.2).
- Theme 3 — Fighting climate change. Reduce environmental impact in the delivery of the contract (MAC 4.1).
- Theme 4 — Equal opportunity. Reduce the disability employment gap (MAC 5.1); tackle workforce inequality (MAC 5.2).
- Theme 5 — Wellbeing. Improve health and wellbeing (MAC 6.1); improve community integration (MAC 6.2).
Tender packs will tell you which themes apply. You won't be expected to address all of them — usually two or three — and trying to address them all is one of the mistakes in the next section.
The five mistakes that keep costing SMEs marks
1. Generic corporate-citizenship copy
"We are committed to being a responsible employer and contributing to the communities we serve" scores zero. Evaluators have read it eighty times. The Model is asking what you'll do, on this contract, that's measurable — not what kind of company you are.
2. Picking too many themes
A 500-word answer that touches all nine outcomes ends up with two sentences per outcome and no concrete commitment on any of them. Pick the two or three themes most relevant to the contract and the buyer, and go deep.
How to choose: read the buyer's wider strategy. A council that's just declared a climate emergency is going to score Theme 3 (climate) responses harder than Theme 5. An NHS Trust will score wellbeing-aligned responses harder than economic inequality.
3. Commitments that aren't measurable
"We will support local employment" is not a commitment. "We will create 2 new full-time apprenticeships in the [region], advertised through [local job centre], with a target start date within 90 days of contract award" is.
Every commitment needs a quantity, a deadline, and a method of measurement. If a buyer can't tell you delivered it from reading the commitment, the commitment isn't good enough.
4. Promising things you can't deliver
Evaluators read a lot of bids. They know which commitments are realistic for a 5-person consultancy and which aren't. Promising 50 work-experience placements on a £80k contract reads as desperate. Promising 2, with named partner schools, reads as credible.
On the flip side, this is the only section of a bid where buyers genuinely do check what you delivered. Public-sector contracts increasingly require quarterly Social Value reports. If you over-promise, you'll spend the next three years explaining why your numbers slipped.
5. Forgetting the TOMs framework
The Themes, Outcomes & Measures (TOMs) framework, maintained by the Social Value Portal, is the de-facto language for measurable Social Value commitments in UK public-sector bids. Most major buyers either use it directly or score against something very close.
If you're not familiar with TOMs codes (e.g. NT26 for hours volunteered, NT41 for equality & diversity training), at minimum your commitments should be phrased in the same shape — quantifiable, with a method, time-bound. Buyers using TOMs scoring will literally tot up your commitments by code; if yours don't fit the boxes, they score zero in the box.
A worked example: from 1/5 to 4/5
Imagine a £150k contract to redesign a council's public-realm reporting portal, Theme 2 (economic inequality) and Theme 3 (climate) weighted 7.5% each.
"We are committed to being a responsible employer and to reducing our environmental impact. We will work with the council to ensure local people benefit from this contract, and we will continue our existing carbon-reduction programme. Our staff are encouraged to volunteer with local causes and we promote sustainable practices throughout our supply chain."
No commitments. No measurement. No reference to the contract. Reads identically to twenty other bidders.
Theme 2 (economic inequality). We commit to: (i) creating one new 12-month apprenticeship at Level 4 in software development, advertised through [Council] Job Centre Plus, target start within 90 days of contract award (TOMs NT5); (ii) running two technical-careers workshops at sixth forms in the borough during contract delivery, attendance reported quarterly (TOMs NT11). Combined commitment: ~210 hours of contracted-staff time, valued at £18,500 using the Social Value Portal Calculator.
Theme 3 (climate change). We commit to: (i) delivering this contract net-zero carbon at the operational scope (Scope 1 + 2), evidenced against our published Carbon Reduction Plan and reported in each quarterly review (TOMs NT13); (ii) hosting the production system on a UK Azure region operating on 100% renewable electricity, certified annually. We will not travel by air for project meetings; in-person meetings use rail with pre-paid carbon offsets logged.
Specific, measurable, time-bound, contract-relevant, tied to TOMs codes, realistic for a small supplier. An evaluator can score each commitment independently and verify delivery later.
How to evidence delivery (the bit most SMEs forget)
Buyers increasingly want to see how you'll report on your commitments, not just what they are. A short paragraph at the end of your Social Value response saying something like:
We will report progress against each of the above commitments quarterly, in the project status review meetings, in a fixed format aligned to the Social Value Portal TOMs codes referenced. The lead Account Director [redacted] is accountable for evidence collection and reporting; supporting evidence (apprenticeship contracts, workshop attendance registers, energy invoices) will be supplied with each quarterly report.
…adds a measurable point or two to most evaluations. It also means when it's time to actually deliver, you've already documented your reporting commitment.
The shortcut: let Forge draft it from your KB
All of the above is structural — it's the same skeleton on every Social Value answer. The hard bit is the specifics: which apprenticeships you can credibly run, what your carbon profile looks like, which local schools you have relationships with. That's why Tenderforge lets you build a knowledge base of these facts once, and Forge drafts Social Value commitments grounded in them — flagging anything he had to assume, so you accept or reject before submission.