From social justice to social value: The changing fortunes of using public purchasing for social ends

Abstract

This aim of this article is to trace the concept of ‘social value’ in public procurement (purchasing by the public sector from private and third sector contractors of goods, services and works) in the UK through four decades of the incorporation of social objectives, primarily in the form of equality and diversity requirements, into public purchasing from the practice of contract compliance. It is important to better understand the derivation and meaning of the widely-adopted but poorly-defined concept of social value as it becomes increasingly common in public policy on procurement. We argue that the policy of contract compliance used in the 1980s contained an explicit intention to advance social justice through public spending, rooted in philosophical conceptions of social justice that recognise structural inequalities on the basis of race and gender, but which have been diluted in the contemporary adoption of social value. Our historical analysis suggests that using public procurement to achieve social justice and equality objectives became an ideological battleground between those with opposing views of the role of the state in tackling disadvantage. The main contribution of the article is a framework for conceptualising the relationship of social justice and ideas of value within social procurement that we apply to the historical period under discussion.