Insight · Procurement · EOT

The easiest 10%
in the tender.

Procurement weights social value heavily. The way most contractors evidence it falls apart on inspection. Here's why employee-ownership trusts walk that test.

Jamie Dawson · Chair, AMPM Group PPN 002 · Social value · EOT

By Jamie Dawson · Published 3 July 2026 · Updated 29 September 2026

Central government procurement has scored social value as a weighted bid criterion since PPN 06/20, which applied to new procurements from January 2021: a minimum of 10% of the total score, higher where justified. Most contractors treat that 10% as a creative-writing exercise. They write about community investment in the abstract, point at a charity partnership, and hope the marker is sympathetic. Increasingly, the marker isn't.

What changed isn't the weight. It's the rigour. Procurement teams have got better at noticing when social-value claims aren't evidenced structurally: when they're aspirational rather than operational. And when the work in question is life-safety, the asymmetry between aspirational and operational gets uncomfortable fast.

PPN 06/20 has been superseded

PPN 06/20 was issued under the Public Contracts Regulations 2015. The Procurement Act 2023 came into force on 24 February 2025, and for procurements under the new Act, PPN 06/20 has been replaced by PPN 002: Taking account of social value in the award of contracts, mandatory for in-scope procurements started on or after 1 October 2025. PPN 06/20 now applies only to procurements that were already under way under the old rules, or that used it during the 2025 transition. What carries over:

The 10% floor. In-scope organisations must still apply a minimum 10% weighting to social value (or 10% of the quality score where price-per-quality-point methods are used)
The scope. Both notes bind central government departments, their executive agencies and non-departmental public bodies. Other public bodies may adopt the approach, and the Public Services (Social Value) Act 2012 already requires public bodies to consider social value when buying services
Qualitative scoring against a model. Bidders still answer against a menu of outcomes in a Social Value Model, now aligned to the government's missions

What's new is the enforcement, which is the rigour point written into the rules. Under PPN 002, every social value commitment a supplier makes in the tender must go into the contract as a term or KPI, and the PPN 002 guide says corporate responsibility statements are not contract-specific and won't answer the award criteria. The next step is already published. PPN 026, issued in August 2026, applies to procurements of £1m or more started on or after 1 January 2027: a minimum 10% weighting below £5m and a minimum 20% from £5m, with at least one social value KPI on the larger contracts, and poor delivery against social value KPIs able to count against a supplier in future tenders.

The structural argument an EOT carries

An employee-ownership trust isn't a social-value flourish. It's an ownership structure, and one the tax code defines. Since the Finance Act 2014, a qualifying trust has had to hold a controlling interest in a trading company, with its property applied only for the benefit of all eligible employees on the same terms. The deferred consideration to the original sellers typically runs over years, funded by the company. None of that requires a press release: it's evidenced on Companies House, in the trust deed and, where the company pays one, in an all-employee bonus that is free of income tax up to £3,600 per employee a year (National Insurance still applies) and has to be open to the whole workforce on the same terms.

The rules have tightened since, which makes the structure harder to game. For sales from 30 October 2024, the Autumn Budget 2024 changes require UK-resident trustees, stop former owners controlling the trust, require the trustees to take reasonable steps to pay no more than market value, and extend to four tax years the period in which a seller's relief can be clawed back if the conditions are breached. From 26 November 2025 the capital gains relief was halved: sellers are now taxed on 50% of the gain. None of that changes what an EOT is. It changes how cheaply a founder can get there.

It survives scrutiny. A community-investment narrative can be unpicked in conversation. An ownership structure can't.
It scales with the contract. The bigger the work, the more the workforce shares in it: by design. Most social-value mechanisms have the opposite property: they get harder to honour as the contract scales.

"A community-investment narrative can be unpicked in conversation. An ownership structure can't."

One caveat the rules make explicit: markers score commitments, not company structures. The ownership model earns no points on its own; suppliers may point to existing schemes to explain their method, but the score attaches to what they will do in performing the contract. What employee ownership does is make the commitments that do score credible. The Social Value Model's fair-work outcome asks about workforce engagement, involvement in decision-making, fair pay and in-work progression, and in an employee-owned business those aren't promises bolted onto a bid: they're how the company already runs. PPN 026 also says Cabinet Office will develop guidance on taking account of existing, inherent social value, such as the wider community benefit of retaining local jobs. Worth watching.

Why this matters more in life-safety

Public-sector buyers procuring fire safety, security or compliance work carry asymmetric risk. The downside of picking a supplier who fails is reputational and regulatory, not financial. Social-value weighting, in that context, isn't really about social value: it's a proxy for "this supplier is anchored". Anchoring is exactly what an EOT structurally produces: the company can't change hands unless trustees who must act for the whole workforce agree to sell, the leadership can't be pressured into a fire-sale exit by an outside shareholder, and the operating focus stays with the operating company.

Procurement teams who understand this ask the structural questions: and EOTs answer them with records a buyer can check for themselves.

The bottom line

Most direct competitors in life-safety and compliance are private-equity backed or owner-managed. Neither structure carries the social-value argument the same way. EOTs do: not because of what they say, but because of what they are. For a procurement team scoring a tender under PPN 002, commitments backed by that structure are becoming the easiest 10% in the document. From January 2027, on contracts of £5m or more, the floor is 20%.

Sources

Jamie Dawson is Chair of AMPM Group. Gemini AMPM, the group's flagship trading company, has been employee-owned since October 2024: Companies House records Gemini AMPM EOT Limited as the controlling shareholder of Gemini's parent company, AMPM Capital Ltd, from 24 October 2024.

The easiest 10%in the tender.