The Act Had Good Intentions. The Industry Gamed It.

A June 2026 article by Darcie Lattin, social value manager at Watson, published in PBC Today, identifies a persistent problem in construction’s approach to social value. The industry, Lattin argues, has become good at delivering social value activities and reporting against targets. The tendency, she contends, is still to focus on what is easy to measure rather than what communities actually need.

Timothy Clement read it and recognised it immediately.

“We’ve gamified the very needs that the act is supposed to address,” he said.

The Social Value Act, passed approximately fifteen years ago, was designed to ensure that private sector delivery of large public contracts produced genuine local benefit.

The mechanism was logical. The implementation drifted. What gets measured gets managed. What gets managed gets optimised. And in a procurement-driven environment, what gets optimised is the score.

Theatre, South Africa, and Eleven Years on Site

Tim studied drama at Aberystwyth. His first job was as a touring actor in a theatre-in-education company. Before university he spent time in South Africa, volunteering with a charity that published and distributed books to communities where many languages had no written form. Setting up containers in townships. Getting books to communities that did not have them.

That experience, he reflects, is closer to the world of on-the-ground social value than the eleven years he subsequently spent on construction sites. His technical career led him into embodied carbon measurement. Social value, he says, completes the loop.

He also holds a Master’s from Cambridge in Interdisciplinary Design for the Built Environment. The combination of community formation, technical training, and construction experience is what equipped him for the role he now holds as Director of Social Value and Sustainability at Morgan Sindall Construction.

The Numbers Go Up. Communities Ask: Where Is It?

Lattin’s article identifies the measurement problem clearly. The industry must move beyond outputs and focus on genuine outcomes: whether a person returned to work, developed a skill, or found a route into employment that previously felt out of reach. Those moments, she writes, rarely fit neatly into a spreadsheet, yet are often the most meaningful indicators of success.

Tim endorses this and complicates it usefully. The problem is not that social value is not working. Social value managers across the country are genuinely changing people’s lives.

“It’s not that it’s not working. It’s just that we’re totally overvaluing what we’re doing.”

The measurement framework creates different signals for different audiences. Converting social value to pounds and pence makes sense for a public sector business case. In the community, it produces confusion.

“You go, where? I can’t see it. Where is it? It’s crazy.”

That confusion is the gap between what the procurement system rewards and what community members actually experience.

Don’t Reinvent the Wheel

The most impactful social value initiatives are rarely built from scratch. Local authorities and community organisations have often spent years developing programmes that address local barriers. Bolton Council’s Restart programme, Lattin notes, already supports people returning to work after long-term unemployment. The Skills Construction Centre’s Trailblazers initiative already equips young people for construction employment.

The opportunity for developers, Lattin argues, is to strengthen what already exists rather than arrive with a parallel programme designed to generate reportable outputs.

Tim’s version of this is built into Morgan Sindall Construction’s practice. He describes ten questions applied before the organisation commits to any social value activity. Does it meet a genuine community need? Does it build on something that already exists locally?

“You can put it in a dashboard and people feel good about it. And the numbers go up. And it just creates behaviours where you chase the numbers.”

Without that discipline, the temptation is to deliver what is easy to organise and easy to report.

​

The Three-Year Question Nobody Is Asking

Lattin contends that social value commitments are too often tied to individual project timelines, beginning and ending alongside the construction programme. Community challenges do not follow project timelines. Barriers to employment and skills are long-standing issues that require sustained engagement.

Tim’s practical proposal addresses this directly.

He would mandate a three-year post-completion evaluation: a formal requirement to return to the community three years after a project finishes and ask what has actually changed.

Not what was delivered. What changed.

The question shifts the frame from activity to consequence. It holds the delivering organisation accountable beyond the point where the project, and its reporting cycle, has ended. Morgan Sindall Construction has committed one percent of contract value to social value in the community.

The three-year evaluation is Tim’s proposed mechanism for ensuring that investment connects to something real rather than something reportable.

Compassion as a Commercial Argument

Tim’s magic wand answer is unexpected. He would introduce compassion into social value delivery. Not as sentiment. As the discipline that changes how an activity is delivered, not what it delivers.

“It’s public money. That’s how it’s designed. And that’s less of an odd thing to say in a public sector or care setting. But you don’t see it on the wall of a social value thing, generally.”

The same three activities, delivered with genuine attention to the person rather than the score, produce entirely different outcomes. The how, he suggests, is where social value either becomes meaningful or stays a game.

Lattin closes her article with a similar argument. Social value should not start with a spreadsheet. It should start with a conversation between all of the partners who understand the community best.

Whether procurement frameworks can be redesigned to reward that conversation, rather than the spreadsheet that follows it, is the question the episode leaves open.