By Zara Harris (Growth & Engagement Coordinator, R. P. Tyson Construction Ltd)
By the end of UKREiiF, I wasn’t questioning the industry’s ambition. I was questioning whether we’re measuring the right things.
Walking through the Royal Armouries between sessions, there was a constant flow of conversations about social value, regeneration and community wealth building. It felt like the built environment is no longer just talking about delivering projects, but about shaping opportunity and place in a more deliberate way. That shift felt real across the event.
But one question kept coming back to me: who actually gets to deliver it?
Not what social value looks like, but who gets to create it.
I remember sitting in a procurement and social value session where the discussion focused heavily on “weighted scoring frameworks” and how they’re used to assess impact. It was well received and, in principle, hard to disagree with. But what stayed with me wasn’t the presentation itself, it was the sense that the conversation in the room and the reality for smaller organisations don’t always fully align.
As someone working within an SME, it raised a simple question: whether the system increasingly rewards those best able to describe impact, rather than those best placed to deliver it.
According to the Department for Business and Trade, SMEs make up 99.8% of UK businesses and around 60% of private sector employment. In construction, they are central to how work is actually delivered – often competing not just with large contractors for access to frameworks, but also with other SMEs for packages within those systems. In both cases, success is increasingly shaped not only by delivery capability, but by the ability to evidence impact and navigate procurement language effectively. Yet the Federation of Small Businesses continues to highlight how complex procurement processes and disproportionate requirements still prevent many smaller firms from accessing work.
That tension was present throughout UKREiiF. The language of local growth, community benefit and long-term legacy was consistent, but the routes into delivering it often felt less so.
This isn’t a criticism of large organisations. Many of the strongest examples at UKREiiF came from major contractors and developers delivering long-term programmes that clearly do create meaningful impact at scale. Nor is it a rejection of measurement. The move to embed social value into procurement has mattered – it has given it weight and visibility that didn’t exist before.
But there is a difference between measuring impact and shaping everything around what is easiest to measure. Outputs are simple to evidence. Outcomes are harder to pin down. Legacy is harder still.
And yet it’s often those harder-to-measure things that matter most – whether someone sees a genuine path into an industry, whether a local business grows because of an opportunity it wouldn’t otherwise have had or whether a place feels changed in a way people actually recognise in their daily lives.
One of the recurring ideas at UKREiiF was community wealth building – keeping value circulating within places rather than letting it drift out. But that only works if the system allows a broad range of organisations to take part in creating that value. If access is narrow, then so is impact.
The Social Value Model sets out an ambition to create new businesses, new jobs and new skills. That intention isn’t in doubt. The question is how consistently the system supports the organisations most likely to deliver that in practice.
Collaboration was another constant theme at UKREiiF, usually framed as breaking down silos and working across sectors. But collaboration only works if people can actually get into the system in the first place – into procurement routes, into partnerships, into conversations that aren’t always visible until decisions have already been made.
For those early in their careers, especially within SMEs, it often feels less like shaping social value and more like trying to find where you’re allowed to contribute to it.
Which leaves me wondering whether we’ve built systems that are better at recognising the story of value than the thing itself.
Because social value was never meant to be something written down after the fact. It was supposed to show up in what actually happens.
If our absence would go unnoticed by the communities we aim to serve, what does that say about what we’re actually measuring?