Social Enterprise Barometer – Financial Performance

Our Buy Social Corporate Challenge is now entering its ninth year of supporting big businesses to bring social enterprises into their supply chains. Since launching at Downing Street in 2016, £477 million has been spent with social enterprises by 30 major corporate partners across all business sectors. The premise of the Challenge is simple: working with corporates to use their core business spend to create positive social and environmental impact. Our latest annual report shows the Challenge had the most successful year ever, as partners spent £123 million with social enterprise suppliers. Read on to find out more about the transformative impact of social procurement.

Our new report, published with the London School of Economics and supported by the Connect Fund, uses elite education as a proxy to investigate aspects of diversity not yet well analysed in the social investment sector: socio-economic inclusion, and the role of power and privilege among those who work for social investors.

This latest report, published at the Social Value Leaders’ Summit in March 2024, analyses public sector engagement with social value. Based on Freedom of Information requests to all local authorities in England and Wales, it builds on a 2016 research exercise to form the most comprehensive dataset on social value implementation in the country. Results paint a mixed picture, with engagement increasing over the years but progress limited by a lack of clarity and consistency. While the percentage of councils with a social value policy or strategy has more than doubled since 2016, these efforts are often not effectively communicated or measured - a missed opportunity for local government to realise the full potential of this transformative approach.