Inprova
2 Olympic Way, Woolstone Grange Avenue
Birchwood, Warrington, WA2 OYL
Everything we do at Inprova comes back to one purpose: to positively impact people’s lives. Social value is how we make that count. The way an organisation spends its money shapes the communities it serves, and we help our customers direct that spend towards suppliers who put something back, so procurement does more than simply buy goods and services.
In 2025 we generated £2.17 million in social value through supplier contracts, an increase of 8.5% on the previous year. Behind that figure are jobs supported, local businesses given the chance to grow, and families helped through some of the hardest moments of the year.
Social value has moved from a nice-to-have to a legal and strategic priority.
In England, Wales and Northern Ireland, the Procurement Act 2023 requires contracting authorities to have regard to the importance of maximising public benefit. In Scotland, the Procurement Reform (Scotland) Act 2014 places a sustainable procurement duty on public bodies, with specific community benefit requirements applying to larger contracts. The National Procurement Policy Statement sets explicit expectations around economic growth, social value, and SME access for UK central government departments, which must apply a minimum 10% social value weighting in most evaluations under the Social Value Model.
For public sector organisations, this creates both an obligation and an opportunity. The obligation is clear: social value must now be considered, evidenced, and reported. The opportunity is greater: procurement that delivers genuine social impact builds trust with the people you serve, strengthens local economies, supports net zero commitments, and creates the kind of lasting change that budget pressures alone can’t. But making social value work in practice is harder than writing it into a policy. It requires the right procurement routes, the right suppliers, and the right tools to track whether promises made at tender actually materialise through the lifetime of a contract. That’s where Inprova helps.
Social value isn’t one-size-fits-all. What it looks like in practice depends on your sector, your priorities, and the people you serve. A school investing in its local supply chain creates different social value to an NHS trust decarbonising its estate or a council supporting SME contractors.
Inprova’s procurement solutions are available to any UK registered contracting authority. Our approach to social value is shaped by the specific regulatory and policy context of the sectors we work across: education, healthcare, housing associations, local and central government, blue light services, defence, and charity and not-for-profit organisations. We help you set the right social value requirements for your sector, select suppliers who can deliver on them, and evidence the results.”
Most organisations treat social value as a separate box to tick at the point of tender. We don’t. As a certified B Corp, we’re independently assessed against five areas that cover the full scope of responsible business: Governance, Workers, Community, Environment, and Customers. That same framework shapes how we think about social value in procurement, because delivering genuine impact means looking at more than just the community grant or the local supplier spend. It means asking whether a business is accountable, fair to its people, generous to its communities, careful with the planet, and honest with the people it serves.
People are at the heart of everything we do.
Social value is most visible in the difference it makes to real places and real people, and that’s true whether we’re talking about our own giving or the impact our customers’ spend has on the communities they serve.
In 2025, £193.5 million of spend through Inprova went to SME suppliers, a record year, up 51% on 2024. We spent £7.4 million with voluntary, community and social enterprise suppliers, and £3.2 million with high and medium tech suppliers, our highest ever, up 52% on 2024. Our DPS and Dynamic Market solutions remain permanently open to new entrants, so SMEs, VCSEs, and specialist local businesses aren’t excluded by fixed tender deadlines.
We back that up with direct community investment. In 2025, we raised £23,116 for Cash for Kids, supporting 1,000 local children over the summer holidays, and contributed £205,700 to Clarion Futures for community grants and social housing residents. We raised £1,500 for Christmas presents for children at Russells Hall Hospital in Dudley, sponsored Lymm Rugby Club’s children’s team with a new kit for every player, and raised £846 for Comic Relief and Children in Need. Our team personally delivered 190 food parcels to 95 families and 12 schools for St Joseph’s Family Centre, and staff and partners together donated over 100 gifts and £600 to Cash for Kids’ Mission Christmas campaign.
Procurement legislation across the UK places a stronger emphasis on this kind of local economic impact. In England, that’s the Procurement Act 2023 and the National Procurement Policy Statement. In Scotland, it’s the Procurement Reform (Scotland) Act 2014’s sustainable procurement duty and community benefit requirements. Wales embeds social partnership and community wealth building through the Social Partnership and Public Procurement (Wales) Act 2023. Our frameworks are designed to support that in practice, not just in policy.
Every purchasing decision has an environmental consequence, and procurement is one of the most powerful levers public sector organisations have for managing it.
In 2025, Inprova procured £50.8 million in net zero carbon solutions, and reduced our own carbon intensity per employee by 6%. Electric vehicle uptake among our team rose 150%, and home-working days rose 36%, cutting commuting emissions. We increased the range of waste types we recycle, and nine of our people took part in biodiversity volunteering with City of Trees.
For our customers, we help embed environmental requirements into procurement specifications and track delivery through Quantum. In England, Wales, and Northern Ireland, the Procurement Act 2023 requires suppliers on contracts above £5 million per annum to publish Carbon Reduction Plans. Scotland’s sustainable procurement duty under the Procurement Reform (Scotland) Act 2014 carries the same underlying expectation that public spend accounts for its environmental impact. We help you go beyond the minimum and use procurement as a genuine driver of environmental progress.
The biggest gap in social value delivery isn't intent, it's evidence.
The biggest gap in social value delivery isn’t intent, it’s evidence. Promises made in a bid submission are easy to make and easy to forget once a contract is running. We’ve learned that the hard way by measuring our own impact, and we’re putting that experience to work for our customers.
Quantum, our spend and contract management platform, tracks social value and environmental obligations as part of its contract obligations framework, alongside the other obligations a contract carries, such as KPIs, payment terms, and insurance cover. Each commitment is assigned a named owner, and every step is captured in a full audit trail. Suppliers submit evidence of delivery directly through the platform, and you accept or decline it, so the record reflects what was actually delivered, not just what was promised. Quantum’s ESG dashboard brings all of this together into a single clear view, so you can evidence the difference your spend makes to your board, your regulator, and the communities you serve.
That commitment to evidence over promises is reflected in how our own customers rate us: our Net Promoter Score reached 73 in 2025, up 24% on the previous year, a result well above the threshold generally considered exceptional.
Social value that’s measured, not just promised
One of the biggest challenges with social value in procurement is the gap between what’s committed at tender and what’s actually delivered through the lifetime of a contract. Promises are made in bid submissions, written into contracts, and then quietly forgotten as operational pressures take over.
Quantum closes that gap. Our spend and contract management platform includes structured social value and environmental obligation tracking. Suppliers submit evidence directly through the platform, and you accept or decline it, creating a clear auditable record. When your board, your regulator, or a government department asks what social value your procurement has delivered, you have the data to answer with confidence.
What Quantum provides for social value tracking:
Social value starts with how people are treated, both inside Inprova and across the supply chain we build for our customers.
We hold our own workforce to a high standard: 92% of our team are satisfied with their jobs, and 91% have confidence in our management, well above industry benchmarks. We’ve introduced a neonatal care policy and a referral bonus scheme, and we recognise colleagues who go above and beyond through a monthly appreciation scheme. We’ve also grown our apprenticeship programme, bringing four new recruits into the business in 2025, with plans to expand it further in 2026.
We expect the same commitment to fair work from our supply chain. When we set social value requirements for our customers’ contracts, fair employment, whether that’s the real living wage, secure contracts, or genuine training and apprenticeship opportunities, is built into supplier evaluation, not treated as a nice-to-have.
Social value promised at the point of tender means little if it can’t be tracked and evidenced through the life of a contract. That’s a governance problem as much as a social value one, and it’s why we build accountability into everything we do, for ourselves and for our customers.
We pay 100% of our suppliers within 30 days, a simple governance commitment that has a real effect further down the supply chain, since small and medium suppliers depend on being paid on time to stay solvent and keep employing people locally. Our own governance is independently assessed as part of our B Corp certification, and we hold our supply chain to the same standard of transparency we apply to ourselves.
For our customers, this means social value commitments don’t just live in a bid submission. They’re recorded, owned, and tracked through Quantum’s contract obligations framework, with a full audit trail from the point a promise is made to the point it’s evidenced as delivered.
