* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Britain's Social Value Act is two years old this month - what needs to be done to move the social economy forward?
It is now two years since the Public Services (Social Value) Act became law and much has happened in that relatively short time.
Of course, there was a lot of good work going on before in commissioning, creating and measuring social value, but there is no doubt that the Act's arrival has helped catalyse more action and push the agenda forward again.
It was with this in mind that Social Enterprise UK (SEUK) decided to hold the Social Value Summit on Tuesday this week, with our partners Interserve to recognise progress, to share good practice and, most importantly, to move key debates forward and to aid implementation on the ground.
As ever, it is difficult to summarise multiple conversations and pieces of learning from a whole conference but here are a few key takeaways of mine:
1) Collaboration is key. One person tweeting after the event said that if they were to sum it up in one word it would be 'Collaborate!' On the one hand, this seems fairly obvious - yes, we all need to work together. But it is the nature and construction of the collaborations that matter and also in which areas and fields of work that the collaboration takes place.
Collaborative commissioning means good approaches to pre-procurement and user involvement, as well as cross-agency working. Collaborative delivery means building partnerships that make sense economically, socially and locally. Collaborative work to improve the consistency of measurement approaches needs to cut across sectors but also link to existing work that is happening in the UK and globally.
2) The messaging needs to change. A year ago, the focus was simply on raising awareness in a general sense, such as "have you heard of the Social Value Act?". For some that question is still relevant, but there is now a lot of activity, action and practice to learn from, too. We need to move away from pure awareness-raising to include key messages in the communications. These might be:
• The Act is permissive – let us focus on what it enables, not what it requires
• A focus on practice - here is what is possible, here is what has happened elsewhere (across sectors and geographies); let us build the social value exemplars
• A social value approach can help transformation - if you are cut to the bone and facing big budget cuts, social value is not 'another thing you have to comply with' - it may hold the potential to create the radical change you need and research shows it saves you money. After all, you can only slice a salami so long before you do not have a salami;
3) Research and evidence is critical. Building the evidence base around social value is critical to informing practice and policy making at local and national level.
If we build the quantitative and qualitative evidence that a social value approach delivers service transformation, better user and stakeholder involvement and design, improved community relationships, more robust local economies, more diverse supply chains, and cost savings…then the case is that much stronger and more compelling. This is something we at SEUK and our partners across sectors (such as BiTC and NCVO) can usefully do with our own constituencies but also in partnership.
There is much more I could have picked out; measurement came up regularly, but I think progress is being made on the journey towards consistency and consensus of approaches and standards, while the unworkable, unviable 'single social value metric' has been left behind. But the journey needs to accelerate and again, collaboration is critical.
Ultimately, what is exciting is that, although there is much more to do and a lot of challenges to overcome, we have rapidly moved from an idea to legislation to awareness to practice. Now we need to build on that momentum, with better collaboration, communications and research, to ensure that change happens on the ground. In short, moving from a focus on the Act to a focus on action.
Detailed coverage and access to recorded streams of the workshops and plenary sessions are available to access for free here.
Nick Temple is deputy chief executive at Social Enterprise UK. Follow him on Twitter @nicktemple1 @SocialEnt_UK
