Local authorities have long recognised the magnifying economic power of spending locally. Money that goes to local firms with local employees is spent by local families, with a proportion of that spend going back into the local economy.
Now councils are recognising the added social value that employing local companies can bring and designing their procurement requirements accordingly. Locally based companies, with employees who bring their own ideas and passions for social value projects, are already plugged into groups and charities and appreciate the needs of the people and communities around them.
Manchester City Council’s Highways team has adopted an approach to procurement, framed by its Social Value Strategy, which allows it to take into account the wider benefits that companies can bring to local people and the environment. The goal is to employ supply chain members who tailor their social value activities to meet local needs and ultimately contribute to making Manchester a fairer, inclusive and more sustainable city.
This focussed approach to social value means that local SMEs, which are already embedded in their communities, can have an advantage when tendering over companies that come from outside the area. And contract wins, such as Thermal Road Repairs’ (TRR’s) recent ones with Manchester City Council, allows local SMEs to further amplify the social value they are delivering.
For instance, TRR has been working since late 2021 to train category D prisoners who have 18 months or less of their sentence to serve. After working with us each day through a release on temporary license (ROTL), trainees can become permanent employees once released. Or, if they decide road maintenance isn’t for them, can use their work experience to move onto another job.
Securing more contracts locally means that TRR now has the chance to extend this scheme to other local institutions. This means that we can offer more local people from this hard-to-reach category the chance to transition into employment as their sentences come to an end.
Sometimes employees provide connections into community projects that deliver social value. For example, our supervisor John Walsh, who is also a Permanent Deacon of the Catholic Church, was our link to a project at the Laudato Si’ Centre in Salford.
The Centre had received a £30,000 grant from the Greater Manchester Green Spaces Fund to create a forest school and community facility in a disused woodland. TRR was able to match that funding to construct a 50m-long accessible path leading around the forest which now provides access to the woodland, with the three-week programme of works supervised by John.
Investing time and resource in schemes such as these, along with other activities such as volunteering on local neighbourhood cleanups or fund raising for local charities, also delivers value back to us. Because we find that our employees value and appreciate our involvement in such activities.
In conclusion, a local approach to social value brings more value all round. And it’s great that local authorities, such as Manchester City Council, appreciate that and are procuring accordingly.
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Thermal Road Repairs: Decarbonising the asphalt repair industry
High output. Low emission. Zero waste. Permanent solution
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