Timothy Clement on why construction social value has become a procurement game fifteen years after the Social Value Act. This week on The Responsible Edge, why hitting the targets and missing the community are not in contradiction, and what a three-year post-completion evaluation would change.
Sponsored by truMRK. New episodes every week.
A June 2026 article by Darcie Lattin of Watson, published in PBC Today, identifies a persistent gap in how the construction industry approaches social value. The industry, Lattin argues, has become good at delivering social value activities and reporting against targets. The tendency is still to focus on what is easy to measure rather than what local communities actually need.
In this episode of The Responsible Edge, host Charlie Martin discusses the article with Timothy Clement, Director of Social Value and Sustainability at Morgan Sindall Construction.
Tim's response is direct. "We've gamified the very needs that the act is supposed to address." The Social Value Act, passed approximately fifteen years ago, was designed to ensure that private sector delivery of public sector contracts produced local benefit. What it produced, in many cases, was a procurement optimisation exercise. Numbers that go up. Communities that ask where it went.
The conversation covers Lattin's argument that the most impactful social value initiatives are not built from scratch but strengthen existing local programmes, Morgan Sindall's ten-question framework for testing whether a social value activity meets genuine community need, and Tim's proposed structural fix: a mandatory three-year post-completion evaluation asking not what was delivered but what changed.
Tim's magic wand is unexpected. "Compassion." Not as sentiment, but as the discipline that changes how an activity is delivered rather than what it delivers. "You don't see it on the wall of a social value thing, generally."
The episode closes on Lattin's conclusion: social value should not start with a spreadsheet. It should start with a conversation. Whether procurement frameworks can be redesigned to reward that conversation is the open question.
If your work touches construction, social value, or the governance of public contracts, this episode is worth your time.
#SocialValue #ConstructionIndustry #SocialValueAct #BuiltEnvironment #ProcurementReform #TheResponsibleEdge
