» Barts Trust Advances Social Value Objectives Through Comprehensive Tender Questions

Sector Healthcare

Barts Trust Advances Social Value Objectives Through Comprehensive Tender Questions

Explore how Action Sustainability’s development of relevant tender questions enabled Barts Health NHS Trust to achieve social value objectives in preparation for their main works procurement for the Whipps Cross Hospital Redevelopment.

The Task

To identify and develop relevant tender questions to achieve social value objectives in preparation for their main works procurement for the Whipps Cross Hospital Redevelopment.

Barts Trust required an assessment of the existing social value strategy, policy, and processes to make those areas more robust to enable a sustainable supply chain and process.

Action Sustainability’s assessment and subsequent work will help Barts Trust ensure their vision and objectives for social value do not only flow down in the procurement process, but the commitments made by tenderers. Especially the successful tendered is captured within the contract award and will be measured and monitored within the contract and supplier performance management stages. This task was in preparation for procurement and is yet to be implemented.

Our Approach

Action Sustainability undertook 4 pieces of work within the project:

Conducting a group discovery workshop with key stakeholders, both internal and external, to understand which elements of social value were most important, given the nature of the project and the sector in which it operates.
Reviewing the existing draft of ‘Vision and Objectives’ paper and providing recommendations for improving it and aligning it with PPN 06/020.
Developing and defining social value question(s), responses, and an evaluation model with defined metrics for main works procurement process (platform agnostic for tracking progress).

Providing advice on social value requirements to be included in contractor scope and/or contract.

“Barts Trust aims to work with its contracting partners to deliver long-term, meaningful change by prioritising social value benefits as key success factors in the delivery of the project. We invited Action Sustainability to undertake a piece of work in preparation to implement and to help embed sustainability into procurement to generate added social value as an outcome, aligned with PPN 06/020. The outcomes of the tasks they conducted provide a robust framework to embed our social value requirements into the tender process, thereby enabling us to give the supply chain visibility of our requirements and to also ensure it is legally and contractually binding on the successful tenderer upon contract award. The contract and performance management piece ensures regular monitoring of supplier performance during the works for continuous improvement.”

Mark Johnson Construction Procurement Lead

Outcome & Benefits

The group workshops with internal and external stakeholder helped to significantly inform the ‘Visions and Objectives’ paper. Whipps Cross being a hospital redevelopment project and due to its geographical location has some unique requirements to be considered for social value. The tender questions were developed in line with PPN 06/020 and to allow for quantitative and qualitative responses from the supply chain to ensure commitments to Barts Trust’s objectives for social value.

The quantitative sections of the tender questions would be used as metrics for measuring progress against social value commitments made by the successful tenderer. The scoring mechanism gave clear visibility of how these questions would be scored, was simplified and implementable, and gave examples of what good and inadequate responses would look like.

The contract management and performance management piece that was developed, will ensure that the commitments made at bid stage, data gathered, and reporting would make that golden thread link from the ’Visions and Objective’ paper down to the ground for when the works commence on site.