‘Procurement and spend’ is one of the central pillars of any council-led community wealth building (CWB) strategy, and is often discussed as a key lever in bringing about transformative change in the economy. Often this is done through policies and processes which seek to test and account for additional ‘social value’ in procurement decisions. However, the experience of many councils working in this area is that this agenda is not yet fulfilling its transformative potential. We’ve been exploring why this is the case and what councils might do about it through a Cooperative Councils’ Innovation Network funded Policy Lab to develop a Social Value Toolkit for co-operative councils.
In Tools for Conviviality (1973), social critic Ivan Illich makes a useful distinction in the way that tools can be used:
“[Tools] can be used in at least two opposite ways. The first leads to specialization of functions, institutionalization of values and centralization of power, and turns people into accessories of bureaucracies or machines. The second enlarges the range of each person’s competence, control, initiative.”
The first has an inbuilt tendency to generate more of the problem it was designed to solve, creating an ever-expanding dependency which Illich calls a ‘radical monopoly’. The second creates the generative conditions for engaging people’s innate capacities and desires to contribute to human flourishing, which Illich called ‘tools for conviviality’. In researching social value policies and the use of social value measurement frameworks in local government, we found that often local government finds itself stuck in a ‘radical monopoly’ of social value practice.
Rather than meeting its original intention to encourage public authorities to assess value more holistically, the Public Services (Social Value) Act 2012 has been absorbed into an organisational logic serving to preserve the status quo, and distract or disadvantage those suppliers, especially smaller enterprises, who are genuinely committed to wider public/social value objectives.
The Social Value Toolkit attempts to reclaim social value from this radical monopoly and present the commissioning cycle as a convivial tool, reminding local authorities of the power they already have to deliberatively discern the qualities that lead to productive relationships and flourishing places and to put in place assessments and governance which will more effectively work to those ends.
The Cooperative Councils’ Innovation Network (CCIN) is a network of UK local authorities committed to CWB and working to co-operative values/principles in order to find better ways of working for, and with, local people. Yearly, they sponsor a number of Policy Labs to co-develop new approaches to local government policy challenges. In 2023, they launched the Social Value Toolkit Policy Lab.
The project is a collaborative effort that develops an expanded understanding of how to pursue ‘Social Value’ in councils’ procurement and investment decisions. It establishes a common-sense understanding of value creation to replace the narrow economistic framework that focuses assessment on estimating outputs rather than addressing the relational conditions that will create long-term positive impact.
The toolkit demonstrates how to reinterpret the existing legal framework, and the tools of procurement and commissioning by:
Councils are bound by the Duty of Best Value and (in procurement) the principle of ‘Maximising Public Benefit’ in their decision making. Under the New Public Management (NPM) paradigm which has dominated local government management for the last 40 years, this has become narrowly equated with economic efficiency, effectiveness and compulsory competitive tendering. The toolkit demonstrates that blindly following this method limits the council’s ability to identify and steward ‘best value’ over time.
We emphasise that enhancing social value is not a predictable machine to be controlled through contracts, but a complex, unpredictable, and interdependent network of relationships. What ‘best value’ or ‘maximum public benefit’ means in a given context is discerned through applied, informed judgement as an ongoing process.
At a local authority level, the concepts of best value and public benefit are given substance by the council’s corporate policies and strategies. The ideas in the toolkit can be applied to existing CWB models where councils have a set of policy and strategy frameworks which place value on a wider set of social and economic relationships (e.g. self-help, sharing responsibility, the value of the commons, and co-operation). This helps to create the ‘golden thread’ from policy goal (‘Mission’) through to a more expansive understanding of how relationships can fully enable ‘Best Value’ or ‘Maximum Public Benefit’ over time.
People in CWB circles often ask whether something like the Cleveland Evergreen Cooperatives in the US – a public authority playing an active role in the creation of a new economic entity which would fulfil future supply chain needs – could ever happen in a UK context. A local authority procurement lawyer would likely answer “no, because it’s anti-competitive”. However, stepping back from the lens of compulsory competitive tendering, it is possible to decide that developing such a model would in fact ‘maximise public benefit’. Under the General Power of Competence, local authorities can legally do anything a person can, including establishing joint ventures, becoming members of a co-operative, or setting up a Public Commons Partnership. They just need a clear and defensible policy reason for doing so.
So, a local authority with strong policy objectives to create good jobs could look at its supply chains, identify future opportunities, and help establish new organisations to fulfil that function. That joint venture could operate in whatever way would best deliver on the policy objectives. If policies gave a strong steer towards giving people greater control over their economic circumstances and recognised the role of economic democracy in delivering that, then it could be justifiably embedded in the governance of the joint venture; or rules could be built in around wage ratios between highest and lowest earners to address economic inequality objectives.
The Evergreen Cooperatives sought to replicate the system-level impact of the Mondragon Corporation in the Basque Country, and on a CCIN-sponsored study visit to Mondragon, our guide was keen to stress that “this is not a utopia, it’s a system for creating good jobs.” It does that by having clear, shared goals and continually adapting how best to meet the objective through its deliberative, democratic management processes. The toolkit attempts to get local authorities to lift their sights and, instead of following a prescribed process, to more creatively engage with the question: “How can we make this a system for meeting these wider policy objectives?”
As lawyers from Anthony Collins Solicitors pointed out in a recent briefing on Cooperation in Local Government, the key ingredients for purpose-led collaboration are all actually features of a co-operative, which is itself a formal legal mechanism for managing a set of relationships formed around shared values and ‘common good’ goals.
In the UK, there are already some examples of governance-led co-operation delivering massive social and economic benefits outside the norms of procurement, but they’re not yet mainstream. Cooperative Network Infrastructure, which originated in Tameside, enables local authorities to trade for common good purposes with private companies without contracts, and Anthony Collins Solicitors are working with a group called Good Food Oxfordshire to establish a co-operative that could provide an adaptive, contractless trading system between its members – local farmers and anchor institution – to further the shared goal of creating a healthier, more resilient local food system. By operating without a public contract, the co-operative may be exempt from procurement legislation altogether. Public bodies could become members of the co-operative and trade under its collectively written rules.
The recognition that cooperatives can provide adaptive, ‘common good’ aligned governance which can enable collaboration across different organisations, creates a real opportunity to put co-operatives and community benefit societies at the centre of the growing movements for relational public service reform such as Human Learning Systems and #DoWith, both emphasising the importance of these qualities, and arguing for a shift away from NPM-influenced commissioning mindsets.
Although focusing on the five pillars of community wealth building is a helpful start for local authorities in developing CWB strategies, there’s a risk that the more transformative opportunities around procurement and spend get lost when viewed only within that silo. The action areas can be superimposed onto existing processes, and the thing everyone can agree on is that we should increase the percentage allocated to social value in tender assessment – even though that might have a limited effect and bear little relation to longer-term strategic objectives. The toolkit demonstrates that social and public value are broader concepts and can be approached with greater ambition.
For the wider movement of community wealth builders seeking to influence change in local government, it’s essential to recognise the importance of policy in determining what a local authority can do. We need to lobby hard to ensure that the right policy ‘hooks‘ find their way into Economic and Community Strategies. These documents need to give a strong steer towards CWB objectives so a big win would be to see some reference to the fact that certain types of economic operator (SMEs, co-operatives, social enterprises, community benefit societies, etc.) are more likely to directly distribute wealth and opportunity, and to reflect and respond to the needs of their communities; and that certain types of economic operator are more extractive and profit-seeking and likely to erode social value. Many of these things are taken as self-evident for people working within the movement but they can be difficult to land in a local authority context that has taken ‘the free market’ as a given for so long.
Another recently published Policy Lab report by the CCIN (Tackling Barriers to Building a Cooperative Economy 2025) proposes expanding the use of a simple but clear distinction between co-operatives and mainstream businesses: namely that they trade to further a “common good rather than private benefit”. It argues that this fundamental difference “has not been effectively articulated by the movement” and goes on to say that “without this clarity, it is hard to make a convincing case to promote co-operation; or even to get people, businesses and institutions to understand that there is more than one way of doing business.” Through this lens, the essential difference between a Public Commons Partnership and a Public Private Partnership becomes much more apparent and could be expected to gain greater traction with policy and decision-makers.
For those within the co-operative movement, the distinction may seem so obvious it hardly needs stating, but through asserting the value of operating for the 'common good' and not for 'private gain', within Policy and Strategy Frameworks, we give councils the tools to purposefully commission, procure, invest, and plan towards those ends, transcending the straightjacket NPM has imposed. One promising example, though not currently adopted as council policy, is the work Oxfordshire County Council sponsored to develop a Doughnut Economics Framework for the county, which provides a significant steer to engage creatively with communities and others in pursuit of shared goals.
We’re living through times of increasing complexity and the appeal of an economics of the common good is starting to re-appear in unexpected places. CWB and the co-operative movement could double down on this simple and clear distinction to ensure that it takes root in local authority contexts and enables more transformational opportunities for community wealth building.
The toolkit and report will launch on July 23rd 2025 – visit the CCIN website to register for the online launch.
The team are also exploring a follow-up project – ‘Beyond Social Value' – which will build on the Social Value Toolkit, and work to embed this new approach to local governance into council processes. If you’re interested in understanding how this could be relevant to your organisation, or want to get involved, please get in touch!
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Contributors to the toolkit include: UCLan, UEL, Anthony Collins Solicitors, Stone King, Inner Circle Consulting, Outlandish, P3, CAG Oxfordshire, and officers from a wide range of councils, including: Wigan Council, Manchester City Council, Birmingham City Council, Oxford City Council, Oxfordshire County Council, Kirklees Council, Rochdale Borough Council, Liverpool City Council, Hackney Council, and Westminster City Council.
Simon Grove-White has worked in local government for more than 15 years, in roles spanning Strategy and Communications, Research and Intelligence, Regeneration, Economic Development and Community Wealth Building, through a community-led partnership called Owned by Oxford. He is the CCIN Project Lead for the Social Value Toolkit and a freelancer working on a range of community wealth building projects.
Julian Manley works at the University of Central Lancashire and was the first Chair of the Preston Cooperative Development Network and is currently Secretary of the Preston Cooperative Education Centre and a Director of NewsSocial Coop. He has been instrumental in developing the Preston Model and has published widely about this work.
Carys Hughes is a research fellow at the University of East London. Her current research project, "Inventing the Citizen: participatory governance and a ‘left governmentality’”, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, explores how local and national government policies and practices can be used to foster collective citizen agency and sustain progressive institutions over time.
