Turning Point releases new social value report showcasing another year of community impact

On 7 August, Chris Sylvester, a recovering heroin addict, is going to sit in a bathtub in Leeds City Square for up to 3 days. He's doing it because he knows what it feels like to be trapped by addiction. He's doing it to try to raise £50k to help other people get clean. Two out of three employers say they wouldn’t employ a former crack or heroin addict. Unemployment is a clear driver of relapse. Getting Clean aims to smash the stigma around addiction and demonstrate that addicts can be some of the most productive members of society by employing recovering addicts to make and sell natural soap. It pledges to donate 50% of company profits to supporting people in recovery. It's mission is “to ensure that all addicts in the UK have access to peer support and employment opportunities”. Chris is the Founder of Getting Clean. After being introduced to heroin at the age of 12, Chris spent 20+ years in active addiction, meaning cycles of crime, prisons, hospitals and homelessness. At the age of 35 he found recovery. As soon as he got clean, he knew that he needed to help other people get clean too. After a few years in support work and running a community project, he realised the best way to help people get clean would be with soap. The event’s goal is to sell £50,000 of soap, which enables a £20,000 donation directly to a lived-experience recovery project led by Forward Leeds. Beyond the event, Getting Clean’s model channels support to people in recovery through both employment and its 50%-of-profits pledge. To find out more about the event, the life changing work carried out by Getting Clean, and how you can contribute through buying some soap visit gettingclean.co.uk/pages/tubtrap

Today's government announcement that public spending must back British jobs and skills in every postcode, set out in new Procurement Policy Note (PPN) 026, is another important step in Social Enterprise UK’s work to ensure public spending strengthens communities. We're especially pleased to see Andy Burnham's government putting social value at the heart of its agenda so early in his premiership.   Raising the minimum weighting for local social and economic benefit to 20% on contracts worth £5 million or more builds directly on the Public Services (Social Value) Act we proposed, helped pass in 2012, and have continued to champion and evolve since (and similarly with the Procurement Act that followed). We also welcome the stronger KPI reporting, including the new provision that poor performance against social value commitments can count against suppliers bidding for future contracts. For too long, social value has been a box to tick rather than a promise to keep, and government is right to say so. What’s changed?  Some of what’s been announced isn’t new. Procurement Policy Note 026 effectively supersedes PPN 002, which already covered fair work, skills for growth, employment for people facing barriers, and pipelines of opportunity for under-represented groups. What's genuinely new is narrower: jobs and skills are now the only route to meeting the weighting, whereas before, authorities could previously use climate, wellbeing or supply-chain outcomes instead. The weighting rises meaningfully at the top end; and the threshold rises to £1 million.   That £1 million threshold is our first concern. Raising it is framed as cutting red tape for small businesses, and easier routes for social enterprises bidding directly are welcome. But it also means social value requirements simply stop applying below that level - a tier where many social enterprises compete. A rule meant to open the door for small suppliers shouldn't quietly remove the lever that makes buyers choose them. It raises the prospect of a situation where a profit maximising private sector company with a large bid team outscores a social enterprise which focuses on job creation. We'd like a more proportionate approach below £1 million, rather than a blanket exemption.  It's also worth the government remembering who already delivers exactly these priorities. Our latest State of Social Enterprise research shows social enterprises employ an average of 72 people each across the UK's more than 100,000 social enterprises, with 43% specifically employing people from disadvantaged groups and 83% paying the Real Living Wage. Creating good jobs and routes into work for young people and those facing barriers isn't a new ask for social enterprises, it's what many were set up to do, and they should be direct beneficiaries of the new weighting, not just intermediaries helping larger contractors hit their targets.  Resilient supply chains  We’re also concerned about the loss of direction for commissioners that was in PPN 002: "Increase supply chain resilience". That rewarded suppliers for a diverse supply chain, including SMEs, VCSEs and mutuals: the closest thing the current model has to incentivising large contractors to buy from social enterprises.  PPN 026's Annex A contains only two outcomes, Good Jobs and Skills, and neither scores supply chain composition. The only remaining mention of VCSEs is a note about ensuring the criteria chosen are ones VCSEs can bid against, which gives accessibility for bidders, but doesn’t reward the larger organisations buying from them.  We know the alternative works. Amey, quoted in today's announcement, is a partner in our Buy Social Corporate Challenge, through which major businesses commit to spending on social enterprises rather than simply hiring directly. Amey's reported social value rose from £211 million to £248 million last year, plausibly reflecting the very outcome PPN 026 has now dropped.   If that route disappears, government risks removing the lever pulling large contractors towards social enterprises even as it raises the overall score; a contractor could hit the full 20% weighting through direct hiring alone, with no obligation to touch its supply chain. With this government’s focus on jobs, it’s pertinent that nearly 8,000 jobs have been created by corporates procuring from social enterprises through the Buy Social Corporate Challenge. That's our central ask for the autumn technical guidance: reinstate supply chain diversity, including VCSE participation, as a scored outcome, whether standalone or built into the Skills and Good Jobs criteria. We'd also like sub-contracting transparency, so buyers can see where social value spend actually lands, and independent verification of KPIs rather than self-reporting.  The opportunity ahead Public procurement is worth £90 billion a year. Getting this right could mean billions more reaching the organisations best placed to create good jobs and close skills gaps. Getting it wrong means large contractors meet the new weighting through direct hiring alone, while the route pulling spend towards social enterprises quietly closes.   We appreciate the new willingness of this government to engage with SEUK, which has led to meaningful dialogue with the Cabinet Office and No.10. We've spent over a decade proving what works, and we'd welcome the chance to bring that evidence into the guidance process before the rules take effect in January 2027. 5 August 2026

The Centre for Information Resilience (CIR) won the International Impact Award at the 2025 UK Social Enterprise Awards for work that includes geolocating war crimes in Palestine, Sudan and Myanmar. As tickets go on sale for this year's Awards, we look at how CIR co-founder Adam Rutland built a team of open-source investigators who turn phone footage and satellite images into courtroom-ready evidence. "There are a lot of bad people doing a lot of bad things around the world. Our mission is to say one thing to them: we're watching you." Not many award acceptance speeches sound like a defiant warning. Adam Rutland's, accepting the International Impact Award at the 2025 UK Social Enterprise Awards, was made all the more memorable because of it. The co-founder's speech was certainly different, something that could also be said of his organisation. Visit CIR's website, and you'll find reports of wrongdoing by what it calls ‘malign actors’. At the time of writing, this included investigations into whether Israeli displacement orders were sending Gazans to genuinely safe zones, how access to water (a basic human right) was being used as a weapon in Syria, and how far-right groups are spreading misinformation about London. Tracking a massacre from a phone video One case shows just how fascinating and painstaking that work is. CIR found a Rapid Support Forces (RSF) camp in Libya. The RSF is one of two factions fighting Sudan's civil war, which has raged since April 2023. CIR was able to prove that fighters from the camp were involved in an attack on the Zamzam refugee camp in North Darfur in Sudan; once home to 500,000 internally displaced people, it is now an RSF military base. A massacre took place there, and most of that number were forced to flee again. CIR traced the camp by studying phone footage RSF fighters had posted online and cross-referencing satellite images showing light sources from desert encampments at night. Investigators then built 3D models of vehicles from the footage, identifying them by markings such as words written in the dust on windscreens and existing damage. Famine took hold in Darfur as food supplies dried up, but the supply of military equipment to the RSF hadn't, and CIR traced where some of it was coming from. Much of CIR's work uses this kind of technology. Many of their published investigations include interactive maps, with dots marking specific incidents; click on one and you might find phone footage that's been verified through geolocation. "Our ability to harness technology, and the methodology that some of us learnt in government — and some of us learnt outside of government — has allowed us for the first time to really move from simply collecting information to collecting evidence that can be used for an impact on the ground," says Rutland. As well as raising public awareness of harms around the world, that evidence is used in national and international courts to prosecute war crimes and other abuses, helping deliver justice for victims, he explains. From diplomacy to digital investigation Rutland was drawn to this work after 15 years as a Foreign Office diplomat, posted to a variety of countries. "In all of those places there were obviously harms, sometimes by authoritarian regimes and sometimes by online actors. And when I came back to the UK, I was determined to do something about it," he says. Geographically at least, he's still close to government: CIR's office is housed in a 19th-century building near Whitehall. Centre for Information Resilience launched in 2020 and now employs 65 people, with a further 200 investigators and analysts working across 42 countries. Rutland describes CIR as a high-end research organisation. "We like to find really difficult, hard-to-find information and package it up for news organisations, for governments, for NGOs, primarily to help the fight against human rights abuses and online harm," he says, explaining the organisation's revenue model and who its clients are. Casting our lot Rutland admits the work CIR does is "quite dark sometimes", which is partly what led the organisation to enter last year's UK Social Enterprise Awards. "I thought it was a good idea for us to maybe just lift our head up a little bit, look at the other social enterprise organisations doing good in the world, and just cast our lot to see if people thought what we were doing was worthwhile." Rutland describes the win as "fantastic," and a tribute to the hundreds of people behind CIR's work. His acceptance speech wasn't planned. "I wanted people to know that they can't commit crimes in the dark, that there is a light shining on what they're doing. And ultimately, somewhere, at some time, justice will be served." info-res.org