Do you know any teachers that are losing sleep over how their students can work online at home? If so, please share this blog from our founder with them.

Yesterday I received a letter from the headteacher of our daughter’s primary school. In it, he set out how the school would allocate digital devices to support homeschooling. 

It’s an issue I’ve been aware of, but this was jarring. Some of our daughter’s friends won’t be able to keep up because they don’t have a laptop at home. It shouldn’t become more of an issue because of its proximity, but it struck a chord. 

Over the Summer 2020, the use of our platform – the Social Value Exchange – by our customers resulted in a number of laptops being shared with under-served households in east London. How does it work? We use an eAuction to leverage procurement spend – to incentivise suppliers to put something back in the local community. In this case – laptops. 

By our maths, for every £100k of procurement spend, we can generate 15 laptops. 

For the duration of the national lockdown, the use of our product will be free for all primary and secondary schools in the UK. 

Please get in touch with me dan@socialvalueexchange.org or the team at hello@socialvalueexchange.org. 

Cuts to vital local community services have put the police service under increasing pressure as it attempts to plug the gaps. Social Value Exchange founder Dan Ebanks says the Social Value Act may provide the answer to getting more resources into local organisations that, in turn, would alleviate some of those pressures.

There is an ever-widening gap between supply of and demand for local public services. Supply has reduced over the past eight years due to the biggest public sector spending cuts since the Second World War. Demand, particularly in urban areas, is growing due to population growth and demographic change.

There are few parts of the public sector where the growing gap between supply and demand is felt more viscerally than with the UK police services. According to the National Police Chiefs Council, there has been a real term reduction of police budgets of 19% since 2010.

And while the police’s attempts to build relationships with BAME communities are coming under strain as a result of the increase in ‘stop and search’, police are also having to deal with local communities that are already fraying as a result of cuts to local services.

For instance, Devon and Cornwall Police have said they spend 40% of their time dealing with mental health issues. Similarly, the Metropolitan Police have said that five people with mental health issues, ‘racked up 8,655 calls’ in 2017, costing £70,000 to answer.

Police as provider of a range of local services?

Massive cuts to local government funding has led to police increasingly being seen as a provider of local services to a range of vulnerable individuals, who are normally supported through local social care interventions. More people are falling through the net and into the police’s lap, taking resources away from services that police really should be prioritising.

Local communities need to be stronger, more cohesive, healthier. Can we look to the Voluntary, Community and Social Enterprise (VCSE) sector to pick up some of the slack? The VCSE sector provides the latticework of preventative projects, signposting and network building that manages and smoothens demand for more expensive and statutory services. While this can never be a replacement for the kind of interventions the police or the NHS make, they are an important part of the local fabric of service delivery. And better resourced communities can apply balm to the difficult relationships between the police and many in BAME communities.

The answer is no. According to the National Council for Voluntary Organisations, the VCSE sector has also had its government funding slashed; its organisations are struggling to maintain the services they provide to local people.

The weakening of the local VCSE sector in the context of policing is a problem compounded by the unique relationship between the police and the policed. Beyond the effective local community safety partnerships, there are equally important but less formal relationships between police and local grassroots community organisations and leaders that help the police police better. If these organisations are suffering, the quality of local policing may be suffering as a result.

How, then, can we get more resources into those local community organisations that work with the local police?

The Social Value Act

The Social Value Act was born in unusual circumstances. As the former MP Tom Levitt recollects in his book, ‘Partners for Good’, the then new Conservative MP Chris White launched the Bill in October 2010. It gained Royal Assent in March 2012, ‘a feat of patience only made possible by Parliament’s long sitting between one state opening and the next, unprecedented in modern times … Private members’ bills usually succeed, or more often fail, within nine months.’

And it has remained a rare piece of legislation, heralded by some as genuinely transformative, by others as a sop to the public sector. Certainly, as a policy idea, Social Value finds its roots in previous Best Value and Value for Money approaches: how do commissioners get the optimal mix of tangible and intangible benefits from our public services for local communities, whether those benefits be economic, social or environmental?

However, the qualitative break with the past comes in the legal basis the Social Value Act provides to contracting authorities to compel suppliers to create additional benefits, above and beyond the core specification of the contract being tendered.

Over the past few years, we have seen an increase in use of the Social Value Act. in 2017, Social Enterprise UK recorded that 1 in 3 now routinely consider Social Value in their commissioning and procurement. Chris White, who launched the Bill in 2010, noted in a recent review that the Social Value Act has been used in £25bn of public procurement.

Social Value Exchange e-Auction

The Social Value Exchange is a marketplace. Marketplaces match supply and demand, buyers and sellers. The Social Value Exchange matches supplier resources with local community know-how.

We saw that, on the one hand, government suppliers were being asked to create ‘community benefits’ in the tender process, per the requirements of the Social Value Act. While suppliers may indicate that they could and would do this, this is not their area of strength. But they do have resources to bear.

On the other hand, when it comes to creating community benefits, this is the local VCSE sector’s area of expertise. They have the local know-how, have the local insight and have access to local networks. But they lack resource — as a result of the cuts to their funding.

We saw that if we could match these organisations we could create a win-win. Supplier resource and local community insight. Use tech and data to get optimal matches and we could create something of real value.

We then went a step further — rather than simply match suppliers with community projects, we chose to create an auction to maximise the Social Value, to maximise the resources going into local community projects.

Since Spring 2016, we have put through approximately £50m of procurement spend through the Social Value Exchange. Independent evaluation shows that for every pound spent by government on the Social Value Exchange, £222 is leveraged for local communities.

Social Value can make the difference – strengthen local communities and strengthen local policing.

Our founder, Dan Ebanks, talks about his experiences of racism and how we can go further together.

Coming of age in the 90s, I would worry that talking about race to white people would sound like excuses for the things that perhaps had not gone the way I had wanted. As a teenager I remember a so-called friend telling me his father said that I felt the world owed me a living; I was 16 at the time. I’ve never wanted anyone’s pity, and I’ve never asked for any favours, like my father or the rest of my family. And, particularly on the subject of race, I’ve never wanted to admit any vulnerability.

What I am writing today has been triggered by the work of Marcus Rashford MBE. He talks about being proud to be British after seeing the response to his campaign to ensure underprivileged kids don’t go hungry during half term. I don’t know Mr Rashford. But to see a young black man standing up and making a positive change in a country where we see a growing narrative that seeks to downplay the unconcious bias and overt racism that many BAME people experience on a regular basis; it’s humbling. As a parent, I can imagine how proud his family must be of him. Thinking about what Mr Rashford has achieved reminds me of London 2012. That was the last time I could look at our country and feel an almost overwhelming sense of pride. That and the amazing work of our NHS over the last 9 months, an organisation I also owe a special debt of gratitude to for the care my son received in the first year of his life.

A few weeks after the Black Lives Matter protests swept across the world, I received a phone call from one of my oldest friends, who happens to be white. Someone I’ve known since I was 18. Someone I’ve shared amazing times with. Someone I’ve shared the worst of times with, too. He asked me what I thought about the protests. He then told me what he thought. He prefaced it with, ‘What do they want?’ He informed me that his daughter had been precluded from an inteview process with Mi6 because she was white. As a fund manager at one of the biggest financial institutions in the country, he told me he knew ‘categorically’ that every FTSE100 company was doing everything it could to increase BAME representation on the board and in their workforce. He finished by saying it was primarily poor white boys that were struggling, rather than black children.

Throughout my life, I’ve been called a lot of racist names, primarily by white people but also by a few black people, on account of my dual heritage. I learned early on these names said everything about them and nothing about me (pity and passion are not mutually exclusive by the way). However, that phone call with my friend of 25 years was probably the most devastating conversation I’ve had about race. I’m going to use that conversation to break a few things down, to hopefully inform the conversation that a lot of people want to talk about.

‘What do they want?’ The vast majority of BAME people in this country want what everyone else wants. The expectation that our kids won’t be discriminated against at school. That people look behind the headlines on, say, knife crime and seek to understand the bigger picture. That centuries of subliminal and overt messaging that black people are morally and intellectually inferior is put right.

‘Mi6 precluded my daughter from applying.’ My friend is suggesting that the system, in fact, is stacked against white people in these political correct, ‘woke’ times. If what he describes is true, it is illegal, unless there were pertinent factors relating to national security in the fine print. Yet my friend, a well educated person, has chosen to interpret his experience as a sign that white people in the UK are being discriminated against.

‘Every FTSE100 company is ‘categorically’ looking to bring more BAME people on to boards and into the workforce.’ First off, I don’t believe that he knows this ‘categorically’. But let’s look at the evidence. If you have a ‘black sounding’ name, you’re unlikely to get called to interview. I remember, when trying to raise equity finance for our start-up, sitting in a room with around 60 other founders and being told that, statistically, BAME people are enormously disadvantaged when trying to raise capital. I was one of two BAME people in the room. It’s enormously difficult to raise funding without the right connections as it is: I can’t really put into words how I felt at that moment. It was… crushing to hear that, in that room at that moment, surrounded by other founders, none of whom would ever have to deal with a problem created by how they looked or what their name was.

‘It’s primarily white boys that are struggling.’ This reminds me of a call I received during the BLM protests from another ‘friend’. He told me how much he loved Irish folk because of their ability to ‘get on with it’. I wasn’t quite sure what he meant. He then went on to tell me about the ‘Irish Slave Trade’. I inferred from this that he was asking why descendants of black slaves can’t just ‘get on with it’ and suck up what happened in the transatlantic slave trade and the structural inequalities that have followed. Because the Irish have.

Now, just to be as clear as I can be on ‘white privilege’.

White privilege does not mean white people do not experience fewer opportunities in the job market, or worse schooling or lower average incomes. It simply means being white does not lead to fewer opportunities in the job market, or worse schooling, or lower average income.

And on the disadvantages that (white) working class people face; well, that was one of the reasons trade unions were invented. I suspect my fund manager friend and the current Conservative government that’s looking to ‘level up’ aren’t too keen on trade unions.

And let me be clear about what I think ‘we’ want.

No more reviews. We’re not stupid. We’ve had enough reviews. Just get on with it.

No more distractions with ‘culture wars’. What exactly is the problem with ‘re-writing’ history? We want better history, better researched and better told. Let’s hear the whole story.

We want to see the power structures of this country reflect the people that live in it. The people who decide how our resources are spent. The people who interpret the laws of our country. The people who keep us safe. We want a fair representation of BAME people within these institutions. We want an acknowledgement of how insidious unconscious bias is, so insidious that it makes black people think less of ourselves. We want action to remedy this. And we want the government to lead on this. To set the right example.

At the end of it all, we just want a fair shake.

And what am I doing? I’m making sure my children’s schoolteachers understand unconscious bias, how it can affect children in primary school and the impact on children’s life chances.

And, inspired by the work of Mr Rashford, my organisation the Social Value Exchange will enable corporate business to fund free school meals for vulnerable and disadvantaged kids across the UK.

By the way, I’m an Arsenal fan. I really don’t like Manchester United. Just this once I’m going to give a United player props for what he does best, which is score goals. Respect Marcus!