Sector guide
Social value for care sector tenders
Social value in health and care commissioning is weighted differently from most other public sector procurement. NHS trusts, local authority adult social care teams, and Integrated Care Systems regularly place the wellbeing and equal opportunity themes at the centre of their social value evaluation — not as secondary considerations, but as primary criteria directly connected to the core purpose of the contract. A care provider bidding for a domiciliary care contract is not just delivering a service; the workforce itself, and how it is recruited, trained, and supported, is part of the social outcome the buyer is purchasing. That context shapes how social value should be framed and quantified in a care tender.
Common social value themes in care tenders
Staff training and qualification pathways
Training is the most consistently scored social value commitment in care sector tenders, and with good reason: the regulatory environment requires minimum qualification standards, turnover rates in the sector are high, and commissioners are acutely aware that undertrained staff create both safeguarding risk and poor service outcomes. Social value commitments around training should go beyond the mandatory minimum and describe what additional training your organisation funds — diploma pathways, specialist dementia training, mental health first aid, leadership development for frontline staff.
Under the National TOMs framework, each training day delivered is valued at £320. On a large care contract with a workforce of fifty or more, a meaningful training programme — twenty days per year across the team — generates £6,400 in recognised proxy value from training commitments alone. The figure is modest compared to employment measures, but it is highly credible and directly verifiable against staff training records.
Mental health and wellbeing support for staff and service users
Care work is emotionally demanding. Commissioners increasingly expect bidders to demonstrate structured support for staff mental health — not a generic statement that wellbeing matters, but a named employee assistance programme, a description of how mental health first aiders are deployed, or a specific commitment to conducting and acting on regular wellbeing surveys. Where the contract covers service users with mental health needs, wellbeing commitments extend to describe how the service itself contributes to the wellbeing outcomes of the people it serves.
Staff wellbeing commitments do not always carry a direct National TOMs proxy value, but they contribute significantly to the qualitative scoring that evaluators apply when assessing specificity and credibility. A bidder who describes a named EAP provider, its coverage rate, and its utilisation targets scores better than one who references a "commitment to the wellbeing of our workforce" without evidence of what that means operationally.
Disability employment and supported recruitment
Care organisations are among the most plausible bidders for disability employment commitments, given the nature of care work and the profile of many care workforces. Supported employment schemes, partnerships with local disability employment advisers, and specific roles designed to accommodate people with health conditions or disabilities score well — particularly where the organisation can describe the adjustments and support structures it has in place. Under the HACT Social Value Bank, each person with a disability supported into employment carries a proxy value of £22,400, making this one of the highest-value individual commitments available to care sector bidders where it is genuine and evidenced.
Care leaver employment pathways
Care leavers — young people transitioning out of local authority care — are a priority group for many council social value frameworks, and care organisations are well-placed to offer them employment. The sector's tolerance for less traditional employment histories, its need for empathetic staff with lived experience, and its geographic distribution make it a credible employer for care leavers in a way that many other sectors are not. Committing to a named number of care leaver employment opportunities, alongside a named partnership with the local Virtual School Head or care leaver team, is a specific and scored commitment in most local authority frameworks.
For quantification purposes, care leaver employment is typically scored under the equal opportunity employment theme, with proxy values aligned to long-term unemployed or deprived-background employment at £12,654 per person under National TOMs — a figure that reflects the systemic barriers faced by care leavers entering the labour market.
Community cohesion and partnership
Care contracts, particularly in domiciliary or community settings, touch the lives of isolated and vulnerable people in ways that create natural opportunities for community connection. Commitments to link service users with local voluntary organisations, facilitate social activities, or deliver befriending programmes are scored under community cohesion themes in some frameworks. Volunteer days — where care staff support local community events or organisations — are valued at £240 per day under the HACT Social Value Bank. These are modest individual figures, but they add credibly to a broader social value narrative and are directly verifiable through staff volunteering records.
Example commitment quantification
The following worked example uses real National TOMs and HACT Social Value Bank proxy values. It illustrates the commitments a medium-sized domiciliary care provider might make on a three-year local authority homecare contract, covering a workforce of around sixty care workers.
Worked example — 3-year domiciliary care contract, per year
3 care leavers supported into employment
3 × £12,654 · National TOMs
2 people with disabilities supported into employment
2 × £22,400 · HACT Social Value Bank
2 new apprenticeships (care diploma pathway)
2 × £13,500 · National TOMs
80 training days delivered to workforce
80 × £320 · National TOMs
8 volunteer / community partnership days
8 × £240 · HACT Social Value Bank
Indicative gross social value per year
× 3 years = £411,846 over contract term
£137,282
Annual gross figure before SROI adjustments. Figures are illustrative using published proxy values. Use the free social value calculator to build your own commitment schedule.
The disability employment commitment carries the highest individual proxy value in this example — £22,400 per person — and is also one of the most credible commitments a care organisation can make, given the sector's operational familiarity with supporting people with health conditions. Two supported employment opportunities per year, across a sixty-person workforce, is a plausible and deliverable number that evaluators with care sector experience will recognise as genuine rather than aspirational. The care leaver commitment adds significant value at three per year — again credible against a workforce of this size, particularly where the provider has an existing relationship with the local authority's care leaver team.
Why NHS and ICS buyers often reference PPN 06/20 directly
NHS trusts and Integrated Care Systems occupy an unusual position in the public procurement landscape: they are not central government departments bound by PPN 06/20 as a mandatory policy, but many have adopted it voluntarily — sometimes wholesale, sometimes with local adaptations — as their preferred social value evaluation methodology. The reason is partly practical: the PPN 06/20 Government Model provides a structured five-theme framework that is recognisable to suppliers, supported by published guidance, and defensible under procurement law. For NHS bodies with limited dedicated procurement capacity, adopting an established framework is significantly easier than building a bespoke one.
In practice, this means that care sector bidders cannot assume a local authority framework (such as National TOMs) applies to NHS contracts, or vice versa. An NHS trust may explicitly reference PPN 06/20 in its ITT documentation — sometimes with a locally adapted supplementary document that maps the five PPN 06/20 themes to the trust's own strategic priorities. An ICS procurement might reference the NHS Social Value framework, which itself draws on PPN 06/20 themes but weights wellbeing and health inequalities more explicitly.
The practical consequence for bidders is that health and care tenders require more careful framework identification than most. A response written for a National TOMs-scored council contract will not transfer directly to a PPN 06/20-scored NHS trust tender: the structure, the themes, and the evaluation criteria are different enough that a generic response will score poorly on both. The opening question — which framework is this buyer actually using? — is more consequential in the care sector than in almost any other, and the answer is not always stated clearly in the tender documents.
When reviewing a care tender's social value section, look for the following signals: explicit mention of PPN 06/20 or its five themes (COVID-19 recovery, wellbeing, helping local communities, equal opportunity, net zero); reference to the NHS Social Value framework or NHS PLUS commitments; use of National TOMs outcome measures; or a purely qualitative scoring approach with no proxy value structure at all. Each of these points to a different response strategy. HelpMeBid's framework detection step is designed to identify these signals, including in documents where the framework is implied rather than named.
For more detail on how PPN 06/20 works and how responses to it should be structured, see the PPN 06/20 guide. For support building a framework-aligned care sector social value response, see how HelpMeBid works.
Build care-specific social value responses
HelpMeBid detects whether your NHS or local authority buyer is using PPN 06/20, National TOMs, or a bespoke framework — and generates a narrative aligned to the right criteria, with proxy values sourced from published datasets.