How many days a week can you commit?

That depends on availability at the time, and on which of interim, fractional, consultancy or white label fits what's needed. The number of clients taken on is kept deliberately small to do the job properly. Get in touch for current capacity.

What size of business do you usually work with?

Three broad bands, and the offer genuinely changes shape at each. £1-5m turnover businesses usually have nobody in-house noticing or connecting what they're already doing for their community, so the work is about capturing and repurposing that into bid-ready evidence. £5-15m businesses usually have the pieces scattered across sales, bids, marketing and HR but nobody owning the thread between them. £15m+ businesses typically need a defined growth project delivered alongside their existing marketing leader.

Are you inside or outside IR35?

Outside IR35 - operating through Emma Cox Limited.

How do you charge - day rate, retainer, project fee?

Cost depends on the tier and shape of the engagement. Get in touch to talk through scope.

Can you scale up if we need more time?

Yes. Most engagements start small and flex up as the value becomes clear, rather than committing to a large project cost from day one.

Will you work from our office?

Yes, when it's useful. My default is remote and hybrid working, it's usually the most efficient way to get things done, but I'm regularly on-site with clients too. I'm based in Hertfordshire and travel within a 50-mile radius as standard, covering London and the Home Counties.

Do you only do social value work, or full marketing leadership too?

Full marketing leadership. You can hire a social value consultant, and you can hire a marketing leader - it's rare to find someone who does both properly, and that blend is the actual offer.

Do you specialise in a particular sector?

Construction, property and professional/consultancy services, that's where my network and experience is deepest. The underlying principles apply to any B2B or B2C business, so it's not a hard restriction, just where I add the most value fastest.

Are you just public sector?

No. Public sector tenders are where social value scoring is most visible, thanks to PPN 06/20, but the same activity builds trust, earns media coverage and strengthens culture regardless of who your client is. Most of what I do works just as well for a private client who never touches a public contract.

Bids Won: Proof, Not Promises

What happens to the social value promises in a winning bid once the bid's actually won? For most SME contractors, the honest answer is nobody quite knows. This piece looks at why that gap opens up, and why closing it, with PPN 026 making it compulsory from January 2027, is as much a marketing opportunity as a compliance one.

BIDS WON

Emma Cox

9/14/20265 min read

Social value is a simple idea wearing a lot of jargon. Strip the acronyms away and it just means the wider good a contract does, beyond the thing it was actually paid for: the apprentice taken on, the local supplier used instead of the usual national account, the mentoring that came about naturally, the materials that would otherwise have gone to landfill.

That idea has a longer history than the 2012 Act alone suggests. Government contracts have carried social conditions of one kind or another for a long time, and the Public Services (Social Value) Act just made it something every public body had to formally consider, in force since January 2013. Since 2020 that's added up to £32bn of validated social value delivered against it: real jobs, real local spend, real carbon saved (Legislation.gov.uk, 2012; Social Value Portal, 2026a). Private clients are catching up in their own way now, some already asking the same questions a public evaluator would without any law telling them to, and any business that bids for anything, public contract or private, is ahead of the game the moment it can answer those questions with something real instead of a paragraph. What's changing is how seriously anyone checks whether it actually happened.

Most SME contractors don't have a bid team in the way a tier one main contractor does. What they usually have is a bid coordinator, one person stitching a response together from whoever can spare the time: the delivery lead on the technical solution, finance working out the pennies, a resourcing manager confirming who's actually free. Social value goes in as part of that same document, written with just as much care as the rest of it.

Then the contract's won, and it's all go for the part of the job everyone's paid to notice, the actual works, on budget, snagged and signed off. The social value commitments, agreed with just as much intention at the time, end up treated as the bit that can wait.

Ask around afterwards and everyone has a reasonable answer for why it wasn't them. The bid coordinator wrote it into the response, so surely it's operations' job now the contract's live. The delivery team are busy building the thing they were actually contracted to build, so that must be someone back in the office's job. The directors saw it in the winning bid and assumed someone below them was tracking it, because it had to belong to someone. Every answer is reasonable on its own. Add them together and the honest answer is nobody, frustrating to admit, but worth being real about.

Fast forward a few months and someone asks for the evidence, and there isn't much beyond a good memory and a few photos on somebody's phone. Thrive Platform, who spend their working lives untangling exactly this, describe a five year public contract where the social value commitments made at bid stage were never mentioned again during delivery, until the final review, when there was nothing left to show for them (Thrive Platform, 2026). It happens because delivering social value never got the same structure as delivering the contract itself, not because anyone stopped caring about it.

It's worth being honest and positive about how far the industry has already come. Social value used to be an afterthought bolted onto the end of a tender response, a paragraph nobody expected to be read closely. Most businesses now know what it is, most bid coordinators know it needs writing properly, and plenty of what goes into a method statement is genuinely happening on site. The gap was never effort. It's what happens to that effort once everyone's attention moves to the day job.

There are genuinely good social value consultants out there now, people who can audit what's actually happening on site and hand back a list of things a business didn't even realise it could already prove. It's still a young field, Social Value Portal called it exactly that themselves, but a growing one (Social Value Portal, 2024). Not every business can stretch to bring someone like that in, and that's honestly fine. It's also worth saying plainly: it can feel harder right now, not easier, fighting for smaller, less lucrative jobs than the ones that used to come more easily, and being asked to prove more to win them. Working with what you've got, consistently, still beats waiting for resource you don't have yet.

That gap doesn't get to stay invisible any more. The Construction Playbook wired social value into how government builds public infrastructure back in December 2020, but the model underneath it split its weighting so thinly across eight separate outcomes that no single promise in a method statement was ever worth enough to change who won a contract (Cabinet Office, 2020a; 2020b). PPN 026 ends that. From January 2027, it cuts those eight outcomes to two, good jobs and skills, and doubles the weighting to 20% on the bigger contracts, reaching down to £1 million so it catches most of the subcontractor packages that make up the industry's actual workload (Cabinet Office, 2026). For the first time, what you can prove and what you win are the same conversation.

Deliver badly against a published KPI now, and that follows you into the next tender. Under the Procurement Act 2023, it doesn't stay a private conversation either, it becomes a public Contract Performance Notice (Cabinet Office, 2025). None of that has to be daunting. A platform like Thrive turns the recording into something you do as you go, a photo, a name, a date, logged in minutes, rather than a scramble to reconstruct two years of memory the week before a review. The bar isn't perfection. It's simply having something to show.

PPN 026 forces the evidence to exist somewhere, because the alternative is losing the next tender or being publicly named for a KPI you can't back up. That's the stick, and it's real.

What most businesses miss is the bit that comes free with it. Evidence captured purely to keep an evaluator happy, the apprentice, the local subcontractor, the mentoring somebody's already doing, doesn't have to stop at being a compliance record. It's exactly what a case study needs, what a LinkedIn post needs, what a website page or a trade press piece or the next pitch meeting needs, and it's already been written down, dated and checked. Most businesses do the work, satisfy the KPI, and leave it there, filed somewhere procurement can find it and nobody else ever will.

That's the opportunity hiding inside the obligation. The same discipline that keeps a business compliant is the same discipline that gives marketing something real to say, on a schedule, across everything a business puts out, not just the next tender. A business that's visibly been doing this for years doesn't just answer a method statement question better. It walks into the next tender already halfway believed, because someone, a client, a journalist, an evaluator, has seen the proof somewhere before. Done consistently, it's marketing directly affecting the bottom line, bid after bid, because trust doesn't reset to zero every time you submit.

Somewhere in most construction businesses, that proof already exists. It's just sitting with the person who did the work, not the person who wrote it into the bid, and further still from whoever's actual job it is to make sure someone else finds out.

References

Cabinet Office (2020a). The Construction Playbook. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-construction-playbook

Cabinet Office (2020b). Procurement Policy Note 06/20: Taking Account of Social Value in the Award of Central Government Contracts. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/procurement-policy-note-0620-taking-account-of-social-value-in-the-award-of-central-government-contracts

Cabinet Office (2025). Procurement Act 2023. https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/procurement-act-2023

Cabinet Office (2026). Procurement Policy Note 026: The Social Value Model. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/ppn-026-the-social-value-model/ppn-026-the-social-value-model-html

Legislation.gov.uk (2012). The Public Services (Social Value) Act 2012 (Commencement) Order 2012. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2012/3173/made

Social Value Portal (2024). Social Value Jobs: Pioneering a Path to Purpose. https://www.socialvalueportal.com/news-and-insights/social-value-jobs-pioneering-a-path-to-purpose

Social Value Portal (2026a). Why 2026 Will Be a Step Change for Social Value. https://www.socialvalueportal.com/news-and-insights/how-social-value-will-mature-in-2026-and-beyond

Thrive Platform (2026). From Weighting to Worth: Why Social Value Is Won or Lost After the Contract Is Awarded. https://www.thrive-platform.com/why-social-value-is-won-or-lost-after-the-contract-is-awarded/