Local jobs and spending: what Scape’s 97% social value means for project teams
Reviewed by Joe Ashwell
First reported on New Civil Engineer
30 Second Briefing
Local jobs and local supply-chain spending generated 97% of measured social value across 445 construction and civil engineering projects delivered in England, Scotland and Wales in 2025, Scape’s latest Social Value Benchmarking Report finds. The analysis, based on projects procured through Scape frameworks, shows that direct employment, apprenticeships and local procurement dominate value creation compared with softer initiatives such as community engagement programmes. For contractors and consultants, the data signals that bid strategies and KPIs around social value will be judged primarily on quantifiable local employment and spend metrics.
Technical Brief
- For geotechnical and civils teams, bid-stage social value method statements now need hard employment and spend baselines.
- Framework KPIs are likely to weight measurable local labour and procurement far above qualitative community initiatives.
Our Take
Because Scape’s Social Value Benchmarking Report spans 445 projects across England, Scotland and Wales in 2025, it effectively gives UK clients a de facto baseline for weighting local labour and procurement in bid evaluation, rather than relying on one-off project case studies.
With 902 Infrastructure stories and 2,341 tag-matched ‘Projects’ pieces in our database, this is one of the few that quantifies social value at portfolio scale, which means asset owners can benchmark their own frameworks against a national data set rather than local authority anecdotes.
New Civil Engineer’s ongoing coverage of digital handover and asset management platforms suggests a near-term opportunity to hard‑wire Scape’s social value metrics into project CDEs, so that local jobs and spend can be tracked in real time rather than reconstructed at year-end.
Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.
