As Strategic Account Manager to the public sector, Amy Hazlehurst works with local authorities, universities, and trusts to help them unlock the full potential of Social Value. She’s seen firsthand how it can be applied not just as a procurement tool, but as a powerful strategic lever for lasting change.
In this conversation, Amy highlights the projects that have inspired her and reflects on the bigger picture: why embedding Social Value into organisational strategy matters, the importance of moving beyond procurement alone, and why contract management will be key to delivering real impact for communities in the years ahead.
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What Social Value projects are you proud to have supported?
I’m working with about 35 different members, all in the public sector – mostly local authorities, but also universities, higher education organisations, and trusts. My favourite projects are where I'm working with a really engaged group of people who are using Social Value as a strategic lever, and there are two real ones that spring to mind.
Rotherham Council
Rotherham Council really get Social Value and they put it at the heart of their activities and operations. If you're bidding for a contract with Rotherham Council, anything above £100,000 will have a 20% Social Value weighting, so it can be make or break.
We've been helping them of late to work with their anchor institutions and we've done a piece of strategic work with them to create a Social Value plan. There's £500 million worth of collective spend that they can leverage – if we take a conservative estimate of 10% per year being Social Value, that's over £50 million of Social Value.
The Government Property Agency
One of the other projects I'm really proud to have been engaged with is with the Government Property Agency. They've been tasked with developing regional centres of excellence around the country to level up the country and move 22,000 civil service staff outside of London to different areas: Darlington, Stoke, Birmingham.
They've been working with us to quantify the impact of that and measure Social Value throughout the procurement process, but equally using the TOM System through the design process. In their planning statements, they're looking at local needs and benchmarking what can be achieved. In just 18 months, we've been able to capture £65 million worth of Social Value on those projects alone, and it's set to grow much bigger.
What do you wish more organisations understood about Social Value?
Social Value doesn’t need to be as complicated as it's become. It's an age-old industry that's about doing good – a triple bottom line issue.
If there's one thing that I wish organisations knew, it’s that there is an opportunity through making Social Value core. If you can put it right at the top of your strategic decisions, you can go much further. I have a little mantra for myself based on a song lyric: “It's not what you do, it's the way that you do it”. That's what gets results.
💡 Making Social Value core: How to create your strategy
How can the public sector improve its approach to Social Value?
If I could wave a magic wand and change one thing about the way the public sector is approaching Social Value, it would be to take it out of procurement. This is not just a procurement activity. This is something that matters to all departments, and it's everybody's responsibility to collectively work together and make sure it's delivered.
That includes engaging with suppliers to find out what their niche is and how they can support on a particular initiative, promoting particular skills gaps, making sure that whatever is procured on a contract is then delivered. That's not just procurement’s responsibility; that’s about service areas working with procurement and suppliers to make sure we're delivering more for communities. And that comes right from the very top.
I'd like the sector to become really needs-focused and targeted to exactly what is required in that area, with suppliers using their niche expertise to deliver real change.
The biggest challenge I think local authorities are having with unlocking Social Value is actually working with their contract managers to then deliver it. That delivery point is crucial. You can ask for the world, but if the supplier isn’t going to give it, then they shouldn’t have been awarded the contract in the first place.
We have a robust way of capturing commitments from suppliers, contextualising them, and providing the reporting tools and ultimately the validation process: that external integrity to say that Social Value has been delivered. Contract managing Social Value to make sure that it’s core to the contract is, I think, going to be the big change we'll see in the next couple of years.
💡 Explore: Social Value success stories
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