By Matt Grey, event:decision
On 20 July, Andy Burnham was sworn in as prime minister. Days earlier, setting out his priorities at a policy speech in Manchester, he had pledged to overhaul public procurement in favour of social value and hinted at a national rollout of the Preston-style community wealth building model he has championed for a decade as mayor of Greater Manchester. Guy Battle, chief executive of the Social Value Portal, called it potentially “the biggest opportunity for the Social Value movement since the Social Value Act 2012.”
For the events industry, that should be a bigger story than it currently is. Social value is not a new idea, but it is about to be enforced, weighted and quantified in ways it never has been before – and events, whether organisers realise it or not, sit squarely inside that system.
A decade of law, and now a lever
The Public Services (Social Value) Act 2012 already requires English and Welsh public authorities to consider how a contract might improve the economic, social and environmental wellbeing of the area it serves. The Procurement Act 2023 hardened that into a duty: contracting authorities must “have regard to the importance of maximising public benefit” when awarding public contracts. And since February 2025, Procurement Policy Note 002 has made it mandatory: central government procurements must give social value a minimum 10% weighting in award criteria, rising further wherever a supply market is judged mature enough to bear it.
Burnham’s stated ambition goes further still. In his own account, he wants a definition of social value that moves beyond jobs alone to cover local supply chains, support for the third sector and broader place-based benefit – applied with the same rigour nationally that he built into Greater Manchester’s own Good Growth Fund. The direction of travel is unambiguous: social value is moving from a soft scoring criterion to a hard, auditable line item in how public money gets spent.
Why this reaches events
Two things make this relevant to brands, agencies and the venues and cities that host them.
The first is direct exposure. A growing share of conferences, exhibitions, awards ceremonies and public-facing events are commissioned through frameworks and contracts – NHS trusts, local authorities, combined authorities, universities, arm’s-length bodies – where a social value score already sits alongside price. An agency that cannot state, in a live and defensible way, what it contributes in supply chain spend or community engagement will simply score worse before cost is even compared. In some procurements, it may not get to the table at all.
The second is indirect, and arguably more interesting:
events are themselves potent generators of exactly the outcomes social value policy is designed to reward.
Local spend, footfall, skills, temporary and permanent jobs, apprenticeships, civic pride in a host city – conferences and exhibitions produce all of it. The Social Value Portal’s own benchmarking across the public contracts it supports finds an average uplift of roughly 37p of social value for every £1 spent. Greater Manchester Combined Authority weighted social value at 15% on its major waste contract with SUEZ; STAR Procurement, working across several Greater Manchester and North West councils, has generated more than £183 million in validated social value since 2014. Once that same logic is extended to public-sector-linked events, the agencies that can produce a number will win business that the agencies offering only a narrative will not.
The measurement gap nobody has filled
Here is the problem: no dedicated social value framework yet exists for events. The National TOMs Framework and the Social Value Portal’s TOM System – the closest thing the UK has to a standard – were built for long-duration contracts: construction, facilities management, waste, care. They assume years of headcounts, apprenticeship starts and spend data, not the compressed timeline of a three-day conference or a single awards dinner. Search as we might, there is no equivalent framework built for the way events work. So, we built one.
That gap will feel familiar to anyone who has worked in event carbon measurement over the past five years. Carbon started as a nice-to-have in RFPs, became a default question, and is now often a contractual requirement. Social value is on an identical curve, a few years behind, and it now has a prime minister who has spent a decade putting it into practice pushing it forward.
The opportunity, if the industry moves now
Brands and agencies that build the capability to quantify social value per event will not just be ticking a compliance box. They will walk into pitches, public and private, with a story AND a number, at precisely the moment the market starts asking for one.
No need to calculate that social number from scratch. It’s what our own Impact suite at event:decision was built to produce.
Impact: Event gives corporate event owners and their agencies a Scorecard benchmarked across environmental, social and governance performance, event by event, against sector peers – and, alongside it, a quantified Social Value Yield (SaVY): the answer to the “how much is this actually worth” question, expressed as a £ figure or a percentage of budget, in the same way a carbon tool converts activity into tCO2e.
For agencies, this means walking into a pitch with real delivery data and peer benchmarks already in hand, before a client’s procurement team has even asked the question – and keeping that intelligence to sharpen the next bid, and the one after that.
The same logic runs the other way for the hotels and venues that host and supply events, not just those that commission them. Buyers are increasingly shortlisting venues on performance, not just capacity and day rate, which is why Impact: VenueLens lets a hotel or venue turn what it actually delivers into benchmarked, evidenced intelligence it can drop straight into a bid – proof of performance rather than a page of credentials – that buyers struggle to align with their own event.
AV and production partners sit in the same supply chain: Impact: AdVantage does the equivalent job for power, freight, crew travel, skills transfer and kit utilisation, surfacing the credible wins hiding in a supply chain before a client asks about them.
And associations and destinations choosing between venues, or building the case for a bid city, are exactly the audience this was built for – a comparable, evidenced number wins a social-value-weighted procurement process in a way a glossy digital brochure never quite does.
The industry doesn’t need to build this from nothing
event:decision’s Impact suite already benchmarks event performance against sector peers, evidences it against the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and quantifies social value in a language a client, a budget-owner or a procurement officer can use to compare one events proposal against another – the same discipline we’ve applied to carbon for years: measure it properly, report it credibly, and use it to win business rather than merely survive an audit.
The organisations that start measuring now – whether they’re the in-house team commissioning the event, the agency delivering it, the venue hosting it, or the AV partner powering it – will help set the standard. Everyone else will spend the next few years catching up, exactly as many did with carbon.