There is no social value checklist

BCO Conference 2026 insights: Social value is complicated, and that’s OK. Communities are complicated too. What that means is that successful social impact can and should mean different things to different people in different places.

“The question should never be ‘what does social value mean?’,” said Kieran Ronnie, head of social value, Europe, at AECOM. “It should be ‘what does social value mean here? In this place.”

Social value can’t be reduced to a universal checklist. It can’t even be reduced to a single definition. Perhaps it doesn’t need one. Perhaps the time has come to accept the fact that social value, like the communities it serves, can be a bit confusing – even a bit messy – and that the industry should be focusing less on chasing a neat, but ultimately unhelpful and reductive, definition, and more on tangible delivery.

“You have to understand the local needs first and make sure your social value strategy responds to them first and foremost,” said Neil Onions, founding director of Beyond the Box, a social enterprise and civic engagement practice set up to help developers, local authorities and cultural organisations better involve and include communities in how built world projects and places are shaped and delivered.

“Don’t fall into the trap of building places around local communities rather than building places for them,” he said.

That means talking to those communities, of course, but also considering who you are speaking to – and who you have the most access to – before making any firm decisions.

Key considerations

“Sometimes, it’s the loudest voices that get heard,” said Nick Walker, director of built heritage and townscape at Iceni Projects. “But what about the person holding down three jobs who doesn’t have time to come to the consultations? They are probably the people who matter the most.”

It is crucial, he added, that those delivering any kind of social impact, from contractors to consultants and from architects to planners, really understand the community they are serving. And that they refrain from delivering a load of flowers beds: “Local communities don’t want those,” he said.

While it may have been a flippant remark, the comment holds a lot of truth and value as part of wider discussion around delivering meaningful social value.

People don’t want tokens. They want real impact.

“Social value is about leaving a legacy,” said Callum Scott, ESG lead at Multiplex. “As a main contractor, this is so important. We want to change people’s lives.”

That legacy can take many forms, from bringing more jobs to a local area to improving accessibility or designing and delivering places that work for and support different generations and genders.

The earlier the better

While outcomes vary, there was one point on which there was unanimous agreement: successful social value starts early. Last-minute add-ons are far less likely to create long-lasting benefits.

“When we consider social impact, people often jump to things like local activities and career days,” said Onions. “If you want a real impact, you have to think about it at the start of the process, decide what you are committing to and make sure there is accountability from whoever is procuring what you are going to deliver.”

For Simon Bone, principal at Perkins & Will, this means things like accessibility and new community spaces have to be included at the very early stages of a project.

“These are aspirations that need to be actively transformed into a strategy, embedded into a plan and measured to help us understand how successful they have been,” he said. “We should be asking who is using the spaces we have delivered? How have they made them feel? What has the feedback been? That’s all key information.”

Measuring the impact of social value can be as confusing as the concept itself, but in an ocean of metrics there is one thing that tells us more about how well a place or space is serving the people around it than anything else – how the local community responds.

“Successful social impact is viscerally felt by the local community,” said Onions. “And that is the only measurement that matters.”

Words by Emily Wright