Lancashire Skills Hub supports the Lancashire Enterprise Partnership’s commitment to maximising the Social Value benefits of its projects and programmes to generate local employment, training and business opportunities.
Social Value forms part of the Grant Funding Agreement, with project sponsors (and their sub-contractors) required to ensure that the Social Value Act 2012 is observed in any procurement processes.
Lancashire Enterprise Partnership (LEP) maximises social value through the procurement and commissioning of its programmes. The Skills Hub has developed a common social value framework which the LEP has woven throughout its projects and programmes.
The Social Value Framework provides target outputs against a number of key priority measures which are informed by the strategic themes within the Lancashire Skills and Employment Framework – Future Workforce, Inclusive Workforce and Skilled and Productive Workforce.
This framework has been aligned with national frameworks and represents a major breakthrough in establishing a simple, intelligible methodology and reporting standard for social value.
The principal benefits of a minimum and consistent reporting standard for social value are that it:
- Provides a consistent approach to measuring and reporting social value
- Allows for continuous improvement
- Provides a robust, transparent and defensible solution for assessing and awarding tenders
- Allows organisations to compare their own performance by sector and industry benchmarks and understand what good looks like
- Reduces the uncertainty surrounding social value measurement
These measures have been mapped and aligned across the LEP Projects and programmes including:
- Growth Deal Projects
- Boost 3 – Business Support
- Lancashire Careers Hub
- Skills Bootcamps
- City Deal: Infrastructure, Housing and Commercial
For further information see: Social Value Toolkit