Good growth in every postcode is built on social value
Andy Burnham’s government has made “good growth in every postcode” its defining ambition. This is a deliberately place-based promise where success will depend on improvement to people’s lives at local level rather than an increase in national output alone.
By pairing economic progress with social progress, this government has indicated that the real measure of achievement will depend on tangible social, economic and environmental benefits that communities can see and feel. This means better jobs, decent homes, healthier neighbourhoods, cleaner energy, places that work where people feel they belong.
A promise pitched at every part of the United Kingdom raises the premium on knowing which interventions will genuinely improve life in a given place. It strengthens the case for social value, particularly when it comes to housing development and regeneration. The question is how to deliver that value reliably, in a way that supports local needs, creates opportunities and leaves a positive lasting legacy for future generations.
Devolution provides the opportunity
Plans for devolution provide the vehicle to shape development and regeneration more closely around the priorities of people and places. The government’s recent Rewiring the State cabinet statement sets out plans to hand mayors and strategic authorities the levers that shape places: investment allocation, spatial strategy, housing, transport and skills, backed for the first time by a share of local income tax from 2028.
The decisions that determine how social value is delivered at local level is moving closer to the people who benefit directly. Clearly defined local targets and outcomes frameworks will turn ‘good growth’ from an abstract concept to something the public can hold mayors and local leaders accountable for. It is how devolved power earns and keeps its mandate.
Investment & planning make it happen
As power sits nearer to residents, community consent matters will matter more than ever, and local support depends on benefits people can see in their own streets. This matters not only for local politicians but for the investors, developers, housing associations, and planning authorities delivering new housing and regeneration. Genuine engagement and demonstrable local impact become an essential part in the planning and designing process to bring forward a development, not a compliance exercise at the edge of a project.
Most of what determines a scheme’s social, economic and environmental impact is fixed upstream: the mix of homes and tenures, the design of streets and public space, whether a site connects people to work, whether the buildings are cheap to heat and possible to keep cool, access to green space and local amenities. By the time a project reaches delivery and procurement, those choices have largely been made.
Considering people and place at those early stages also de-risks investment. Schemes designed around genuine local need hold their value, secure consent more smoothly and prove more durable. The Good Economy put it well in its recent report on Scaling-up Local Investing for Place-Based Impact: regeneration should not be viewed “solely through the lens of property value uplift or financial returns” but depends on “the creation of places that remain economically and socially resilient over time”. Resilient places are lower-risk places. Social value, considered from the beginning, is not a cost bolted on at the end. It is what makes investment and planning more certain.
It starts with understanding a place, identifying local needs and shaping interventions with communities and stakeholders in mind. Leading businesses know this. The Social Value Commission, an independent body which includes Barratt Redrow, E.ON UK and Knight Dragon amongst others, is developing a tool to assess the social value need of every local authority in the country. This signals a direction of travel is towards defining value locally, place by place, rather than against a single national checklist.
Procurement embeds the change
Where does public procurement fit in all this? Some have read the recent streamlining of the social value requirements in public procurement as a signal that the wider agenda is being scaled back. Under new rules which come into effect next year, suppliers tendering for government contracts are being asked for social value commitments focused specifically of jobs and skills, dropping previous requirements around much broader outcomes such as carbon reduction and wellbeing.
But a narrower procurement scoring need not narrow the ambition overall. The outcomes that have dropped off the model are precisely what deliver the ones that remain. Inclusion and diversity practices are how you reach those furthest from the labour market. Wellbeing and health determine whether local people are able to work at all. And the transition to clean energy is where many of the good new jobs and skills will be created.
Given that government spends £90 billion each year through contracts, procurement has an enormous role to play in ensuring that money is used to support good growth. But the spend will be most effective if closely aligned with social value outcomes baked in through investment, planning and design.
Set from the start, social value is the thread the runs through successful development and regeneration – attracting investment, securing planning consent and above all winning the support of communities who will ultimately hold leaders to account.
To make it count, we have to get better at demonstrating it. That means identifying the changes needed to genuinely improve people’s lives, measuring what actually matters, not what is easy to count, and articulating the benefit in a narrative that resonates with lived experience. That begins not with a spreadsheet but with place: understanding what a particular community needs and building a real dialogue with the people who live there.
