In August 2026, the government published an updated Social Value Model, PPN 026. The previous iteration, PPN 002 has been in place since February 2025, but PPN 026 is directly aligned with Andy Burnham’s “Buying British” pledge and has streamlined the model down to just 2 outcomes, both relating to jobs and opportunities:
Outcome 1: Good jobs offering fair pay and good working conditions, helping people to get a job, stay in work, and progress in their careers, with good employment opportunities across the country.
Outcome 2: Skills: activities to address skills shortages, promoting skills development opportunities particularly to those who face barriers to employment or struggle to engage in the labour market.
Each outcome has 3 objectives, or “award criteria” that sit within it, but the model no longer contains any environmental or health and wellbeing outcomes – probably the biggest noticeable difference between this model and the old one. These award criteria are as follows:
Outcome 1 | Outcome 2 |
1a Create and/or retain high-quality jobs | 2a Training/retraining |
1b Fair working conditions | 2b In-work progression |
1c Fair pay | 2c Talent pipeline |
Another key difference is the weighting to be applied to Social Value. For contracts worth between £1 million and £5 million (inclusive of VAT), a minimum of 10% weighting needs to be applied, and for those contracts above £5 million (inclusive of VAT), this weighting increases to 20%. In addition, for those contracts above £5 million, at least one KPI related to social value needs to be set, and reported against – further strengthening the importance of any social value commitments made at tender stage. Note – Social Value also features when applying for a place on a framework, not just for a direct award contract, so make sure you read carefully what’s expected at framework award. The model isn’t mandated for contracts worth less than £1 million.
This model isn’t used by all public sector buyers – it’s mandated for central government departments, their executive agencies and non-departmental public bodies. This means, for example, ministerial departments such as the Department for Transport, the Department for Education or the Ministry of Defence, agencies like the DVLA, HMPPS or Met Office, and public bodies like the Environment Agency or the H&S Executive. This new model must be used from 1st January 2027, but buyers are being encouraged to adopt it as soon as possible.
What Does This Mean For Me As A Bidder?
For tenders run by relevant buyers, the social value focus will be on demonstrating that you will create or retain high quality jobs, have fair working conditions and pay, that you address skills shortages and support people with barriers to employment with training and work experience opportunities, so start reviewing what you do in these areas. Do you already participate in apprenticeship schemes? Do you actively reach out to communities to offer work experience, or provide targeted training programmes to particular cohorts? Is there a charitable organisation or SME in your area that you could partner with to support you with these types of initiatives? Don’t wait until January, review where you already create measurable value and collect the evidence. If you’re not strong in this area, put plans in place now so you’re not trying to implement new initiatives at the same time as responding to a tender.
When you do respond to a tender using this new model, you’ll have to make specific measurable commitments, aligned to the buyer’s priorities, but if you can build on existing schemes, or back up your proposals with evidence of previous delivery, you’ll score more highly.
It’s still early days for the new model, and further guidance, including more sub-criteria, priorities, and evaluation methodologies is expected to be released in Autumn 2026, so watch this space for further updates when this is available. The information published so far can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/ppn-026-the-social-value-model/ppn-026-the-social-value-model-html
