Sector guide
Social value for facilities management tenders
Facilities management contracts in the public sector are rarely one-off awards. Most run three to five years — often with renewal options — and carry explicit social value KPIs that the winning contractor is contractually obliged to report against, typically annually. The social value commitments you make at bid stage are not a narrative exercise: they become contractual obligations with measurement and reporting built into the contract management framework. That shifts the FM social value question from "what sounds compelling?" to "what can we actually deliver and evidence, year after year, for the life of this contract?"
Common social value themes in FM tenders
Real Living Wage commitments
Living wage commitments appear more frequently in FM tenders than in almost any other sector — partly because FM workforces are large and operationally dispersed, and partly because cleaning, catering, and security roles are the very roles where the gap between the National Living Wage and the Real Living Wage (as set by the Living Wage Foundation) is most visible to the public sector buyer. Many councils and NHS trusts now include a specific evaluation question about whether the tendering organisation pays the Real Living Wage to all directly employed staff and requires the same of its supply chain.
A credible response to this question doesn't simply state that you pay the Real Living Wage — it explains when you became accredited (if applicable), the proportion of the workforce covered, how you handle agency workers and subcontractors, and what your escalation mechanism is when the rate is uplifted annually. Evaluators in this sector are familiar with the edge cases; a response that addresses them directly scores better than one that asserts compliance without detail.
Local workforce recruitment
FM contracts are operationally local by nature — the services are delivered on-site, often across multiple buildings within a defined geography. This makes local employment commitments both plausible and directly testable: the buyer can ask at any KPI review whether the cleaning or security staff are recruited from the local area. Under the National TOMs framework, each new local employment opportunity created is valued at £12,654, and each long-term unemployed person moved into work at the same rate. On a large FM contract with significant workforce mobilisation — a new hospital facilities contract, for example, where the incumbent workforce may not transfer — the social value of local hiring can be substantial and entirely credible.
The strongest responses specify the recruitment channels you will use to reach local candidates: jobcentre partnerships, referral relationships with employability programmes, advertising through community organisations in the relevant wards or boroughs. These specifics are what turn a generic commitment into a scored one.
Waste diversion and recycling rates
Where the FM contract includes waste management or cleaning services, environmental commitments around waste diversion — the proportion of waste diverted from landfill — are increasingly scored. Some buyers set a minimum threshold (e.g. 95% landfill diversion rate) and ask tenderers to demonstrate current performance and a trajectory for improvement. Others score waste reduction commitments under their carbon or environmental theme, particularly where the contract covers a large estate with significant consumable use.
Commitments in this area work best when they are tied to a baseline — your current diversion rate on comparable contracts — and a specific target for this contract, with a named waste contractor or management system behind the methodology. Stating a diversion target without a mechanism is unlikely to score at the top of the mark scheme.
Social enterprise supply chain engagement
Many FM frameworks and local authority tenders include a measure for the proportion of supply chain spend directed to social enterprises — organisations that reinvest their profits into social or environmental purposes. This matters particularly for specialist FM sub-services: occupational health, catering, uniform provision, and some security services are all areas where social enterprise providers operate at scale. A commitment to direct a defined percentage of sub-service spend to accredited social enterprises — combined with naming one or two you already work with or are in conversation with — is significantly more persuasive than a generic statement of intent.
Staff wellbeing programmes
FM workforces experience above-average rates of musculoskeletal injury, stress, and financial hardship — factors that some public sector buyers explicitly address in their social value frameworks, particularly NHS trusts and local authorities with workforce development objectives. Staff wellbeing commitments — employee assistance programmes, financial wellbeing support, physical health initiatives — score well when they are structured as specific programmes with named providers and measurable uptake targets, rather than as a list of HR policies your organisation already has in place.
Training commitments are also relevant here: where your FM workforce includes roles with structured training pathways — building services engineers, grounds maintenance, catering — training day delivery can be quantified using the National TOMs proxy value of £320 per training day.
Example commitment quantification
The following worked example uses real National TOMs proxy values. It illustrates the social value calculation a mid-sized FM contractor might present for a five-year soft FM contract — cleaning, catering, and reception services — covering a large local authority estate.
Worked example — 5-year soft FM contract, per year
6 long-term unemployed people recruited locally (per year)
6 × £12,654 · National TOMs
4 local employment opportunities created (new roles)
4 × £12,654 · National TOMs
2 new apprenticeships (per year)
2 × £13,500 · National TOMs
60 training days delivered to workforce (per year)
60 × £320 · National TOMs
10 volunteer / social action days (per year)
10 × £240 · HACT Social Value Bank
Indicative gross social value per year
× 5 years = £875,700 over contract term
£175,140
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 local employment and long-term unemployment commitments dominate this example — which is typical of FM contracts where workforce mobilisation creates genuine recruitment activity. Six long-term unemployed hires per year is credible on a large estate contract: it represents a fraction of the total workforce, sourced through a structured partnership with a local employability provider. On a five-year contract, the cumulative social value of those commitments alone exceeds £630,000 at the published proxy rate — a figure that needs to be supported by a delivery mechanism and a monitoring process, not just stated at bid stage.
Why FM social value responses need year-on-year credibility
A one-off tender submission is a commitment to a future state. An FM contract is a long-running relationship in which that future state becomes a present obligation. The difference matters more in FM than in almost any other sector, because FM contracts routinely include social value KPI reporting as a contract management mechanism — often at six-month or annual intervals — and some contracts include financial consequences for failure to deliver against stated commitments.
This changes how you should approach the social value section of an FM bid. A commitment to recruit ten long-term unemployed people in year one of a five-year contract is realistic; a commitment to recruit ten per year across the full term — fifty people in total — needs to be accompanied by a credible account of how recruitment demand will be maintained beyond the mobilisation phase. If the contract is largely a retainer of existing staff after year one, the employment commitments need to be structured differently: focused on training, progression, and wellbeing rather than headcount.
Evaluators who have managed FM contracts previously — and many local authority procurement officers have — will be alert to commitments that front-load social value into the mobilisation year and offer little for years two through five. They will also look for a governance structure: who within your organisation is accountable for delivering the social value plan, how will performance be tracked, and what corrective action will be taken if a commitment falls behind? Responses that address these questions in the body of the bid, rather than as a brief paragraph at the end, consistently score higher than those that treat social value delivery as self-evidently straightforward.
The practical implication is that your FM social value commitments should be modelled against the full contract term before you write them. If you are committing to two apprenticeships per year across a five-year contract, that is ten apprenticeships in total — each requiring a host organisation, a training provider relationship, and a position that a new entrant to the workforce can genuinely occupy. Modelling the commitment before the bid is submitted is the only way to know whether it is deliverable. HelpMeBid's commitment builder supports this by showing cumulative totals across user-defined contract periods, alongside the proxy values that evaluators will apply to each measure.
For support building a framework-aligned FM social value response, see how HelpMeBid works.
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