RAIL PROFESSIONAL INTERVIEW Liane Hartley Investment in rail infrastructure
is also an investment in wellbeing, community and diversity
Rail Professional spoke to Liane Hartley, co-founder of Mend, a social enterprise specialising in responsible procurement, planning and place-making about embedding social value in the rail industry
What is social value? The Social Value Act 2012 came into force in January 2013 and effectively made it a statutory duty for public bodies to consider the potential social, economic and environmental wellbeing impacts on local communities and neighbourhoods, of the services they commission.
It is about changing behaviours in the commissioning and buying process to build in greater transparency, fairness and diversity to what is bought, by whom and for what purpose. We use it as an opportunity for levering better social, environmental and economic impacts and outcomes than would otherwise be achieved. The Social Value Act was designed to enable new opportunities for social enterprises, community organisations and the third sector to partner with larger organisations and deliver more locally-led solutions. The government now expects new public services to be delivered in partnership with the community, social enterprises and third sector.
How and why does social value apply to the rail industry? Social value has a wider application than public services and is manifesting in major public funded rail procurement processes as responsible procurement (RP). The Greater London Authority (GLA) has a Responsible Procurement Policy which is cascaded through the wider GLA family, including Transport for London, and this requires its supply chain to meet key RP objectives.
The seven GLA RP Policy themes are geared towards delivering social value through the delivery of GLA projects and cover ethical sourcing, strategic labour and training needs, equality and diversity, fair employment, community benefits, workforce welfare, environmental sustainability and supply chain diversity.
Crossrail for example, has a strong emphasis on responsible procurement and places contractual demands on contractors to deliver on its responsible procurement targets. For rail projects, as clients, it means looking at the smart use of their purchasing power to enable them to tackle issues such
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as: reducing worklessness in deprived communities; ensuring rail infrastructure and assets are inclusive; ensuring supply chains comply with equality and diversity legislation and that they have fair employment practices in place on projects. As suppliers, it’s about how rail companies will form partnerships with external organisations to achieve objectives that are normally not their core operational and management remit. This could include engaging young people out of work and those vulnerable to worklessness, having full visibility of their supply chain to the source of products and commodities and providing assurance that they are managing risks inherent in those supply chains.
Can you tell us more about you and why you set up Mend London?
Back in 2010 we could see that UK government policy was shifting dramatically towards the need for people to become more involved in local decision making and for business to be more responsible towards communities and society as a whole. This was against a backdrop of global financial turmoil and the subsequent calls for austerity and public sector spending cut- backs.
Subsequent legislation reinforced this shift and there having been ever increasing demands on the private sector to demonstrate their corporate social responsibility (CSR), responsible procurement and ‘good’ business practice credentials in responding to public procurement. We were excited by this shift in mentality but we could
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