Guest blog: Manchester’s Experience of Building a New Social Value Policy with Communities
In this guest blog, Dee Lowry from Manchester City Council outlines how the Council co-designed its new social value policy. The process involved sessions with VCSE organisations to test assumptions, gather feedback, and shape shared priorities, enabling them to go further than their legal requirements and meet new challenges in the city.
Manchester City Council has a long history of generating social value that brings meaningful benefits to our local communities, economy, and the environment. We have always gone beyond our legal requirements, and over the years we have updated our social value priorities to meet new challenges in the city – such as responding to COVID-19 and the climate emergency.
Last year, we had the opportunity to do a full refresh of our social value policy – revisiting the overall approach and reviewing all of the previous priority areas. To do this, we had internal workshops and held two co-design sessions with external partners.
The first co-design session was with the local voluntary sector and representatives from community and resident groups. We listened to the sector’s feedback about social value work in Manchester, as both a strategic partner, a potential Council supplier, and often as a beneficiary of social value initiatives. We tested some Council assumptions about what the voluntary sector wants from social value, and we worked on new priorities and principles for social value work in Manchester.
The second co-design group was with current and prospective private-sector suppliers and representatives from membership bodies. We then shared the summaries between the groups for cross-sector review and feedback.
Both groups had similar views on community priorities (e.g., digital inclusion), and both raised the topics of impact measurement and the need for better brokerage of partnerships and project opportunities. The voluntary sector group emphasised the importance of community assets and aspirations (as well as needs), and the want for both systemic and more transactional social value support. The private sector group discussed skills shortages and the difficulty of working across the region where local authorities have different social value expectations.
We listened carefully to the diverse views of these stakeholders, and their views are directly reflected in the new social value policy. The new policy priorities are structured under five overarching themes:
| Theme | Manchester Priority | Greater Manchester Framework |
|---|---|---|
| Economic | (1) Inclusive Growth | Develop locally based-and resilient supply chains |
| Economic | (2) Good Employment | Create employment and skills opportunities and provide the best employment you can |
| Social | (3) Reducing Inequalities | Be part of a strong local community |
| Social | (4) Supporting the Voluntary Sector | Be part of a strong local community |
| Environmental | (5) Becoming a Green & Zero Carbon City | Keep the air clean & make your organisation greener |
The overarching frame of the policy has also been updated: it has been aligned to Manchester’s strategies for inclusive growth and reducing inequalities, the scope has been broadened out from procurement, it directly acknowledges the inherent social value, and a section on principles has been added to bring focus on how social value is generated, such as encouraging community-led and community owned initiatives.
The new priorities are interdependent and used as a frame that can be adapted to different contexts. We want organisations to use their own expertise and innovations when designing bespoke social value initiatives for Manchester, and we hope that our partners will get behind the new policy and continue to use social value as an important mechanism to improve the wellbeing of the city.
Find out about 10GM’s Social Value work
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