
We’ve all read and heard a lot about social value in bids over the last 10 years or more, but how important is social value in the grand scheme of your bid?
Let’s get controversial - it’s pretty unimportant, right?
After all, it’s usually an afterthought by the buyer, to create another challenge for the bidder, whilst ‘ticking a box’ under the UK Government Public Services (Social Value) Act 2013 isn’t it?
Guess again . . . social value has been around for over 10 years and is here to stay it seems.
Regardless of the driving factors behind the inclusion of social value in your bid responses, the UK Government requires that all public sector bids must have a mandatory minimum 10% of the total scoring for each procurement, attributed to social value topics.
The aim of this is to push all public sector organisations and their suppliers to look beyond the financial cost of a contract award and to consider how the services they purchase can improve the economic, social and environmental wellbeing of their local area.
To that end, there are various tools that public sector organisations use to measure and monitor social value throughout contract delivery, but in terms of bidding, your ability to respond to social value topics could mean the difference to you winning or losing the bid.
Let’s look at this in a bit more detail using a recent example of a bid we worked on with a client;
Bid Type: Clinical Service
Bid Evaluation Structure: Quality – 60%
Social Value – 10%
Commercial – 30%
Seems pretty standard so far – and typical of the usual make-up of a bid?
This was one of those bids where there were a number of quality and technical questions – 14 to be exact.
8 of the 14 question responses, were weighted at 5% of the total score, with the remaining 6 responses weighted at 4% each, making up the 60% total for this section of the response.
Whilst the social value question in this response was aligned to the topic of the bid, it was just that – a single question, carrying a weighting of the full 10% of the total score for the bid.
Behind the pricing, this made social value the single-biggest scoring part of the whole bid response – where the difference between scoring 4 points for that response compared to a score of 3 points, would result in a very different overall score.
Let’s put this into context;
A score of 4 on social value – gives you the full 10%.
You fall a tiny bit short and score 3 points – this gives you 7.5% out of 10% for this section – losing 2.5% of the total score for your bid.
Compare this to the higher-weighted quality questions, where the difference between a score of 4, and a score of 3, is worth just 1.25% of the overall – meaning a drop of 1 point on your social value response is equal to dropping a point on 2 or more quality questions.
So maximising points on social value, means you can afford to lose a couple of points on your quality response, or even on your price!
The above example is taken from a real-life bid we worked on for a client in July 2024, showing that whilst social value may be considered as an after-thought, or a box-ticking requirement, whether intentionally or inadvertently, buyers can make this the single-most important aspect of your bid without even realising it.
Quite sobering when you think about it in this way isn’t it?
So how do you feel about the importance of social value in your bids now?
Want to score more-highly on social value? Get in touch today to see how Ocean City Bids can help.
Ocean City Bids is a professional bid agency based in the UK, covering all industries and with extensive experience and expertise in healthcare, social care, recruitment, life sciences and telecoms. We provide a range of services to support your business to bid for contracts, and to win. Contact us on bid@oceancitybids.co.uk for a friendly, informal discussion about your bidding needs. www.oceancitybids.co.uk
Comments