Your social value promises are about to become public record

There's a deadline coming on 29 July 2026 that most suppliers haven't heard about, and if you've won public sector contracts in the last year or so, it directly affects you.

Under the Procurement Act 2023, contracting authorities are required to publish details of payments made under public contracts on the government's central digital platform, and the first round of reports is due by 29 July. That includes payment compliance data and, for contracts above threshold, performance information against published KPIs.

One of those KPIs, for many contracts, will be social value.

What actually has to be published

For contracts over the relevant threshold, buyers must publish at least three KPIs per contract and assess performance against them annually. Where social value commitments were included in the award criteria (which they should be, under PPN 002) at least one of those KPIs will cover social value delivery.

That means the commitments your organisation made in its bid response are no longer just between you and the buyer. They become part of the public record.

Why this matters more than it might seem

Social value has always sat in slightly odd territory. Buyers ask for it. Suppliers commit to it. And then, in practice, relatively little happens to verify whether it was ever delivered.

That's starting to change. The Procurement Act 2023 is built around the idea that transparency creates accountability, not just at the point of award but throughout the life of a contract. Published performance data means that the gap between what was promised and what was delivered is no longer invisible.

This is good news for organisations that take their commitments seriously and have the evidence to back them up. It's less comfortable for those who've been treating social value as a box-ticking exercise: writing impressive-sounding commitments at bid stage with no real plan to measure or report on them.

If you've got contracts in place, do this now

The 29 July deadline applies to contracting authorities, not suppliers directly, but the data they publish will be based on what you're delivering and reporting. If you're mid-contract and haven't set up any system for tracking your social value activities, now is the time to get that in order.

Think about what you committed to in your bid. Whether that was apprenticeships, local employment, volunteer hours, environmental outcomes or anything else: work out whether you can evidence it. Talk to your contract manager about what they'll need from you for their reporting.

If you genuinely can't deliver what was promised, a proactive conversation with the buyer is far better than silence. Buyers understand that circumstances change. What they don't appreciate is being left to find out through a performance review.

Looking ahead

This is the first reporting cycle, and there will be growing pains on both sides. Not every contracting authority has its reporting set up cleanly, and the central digital platform is still maturing. But the direction of travel is clear: social value is moving from being a bidding exercise to being a contract management discipline.

If you're an SME or charity that takes your social value seriously, and most who work in this sector do, that's ultimately a good thing. It creates a level playing field and makes it harder for larger organisations to win on paper and underdeliver in practice.

The organisations that build good evidence habits now will be in a much stronger position when this becomes routine.