We love the idea of Community Benefits – the ambition and legislative push to ensure that local communities reap wider rewards from the money spent by their local authority is to be applauded. However, over the past several years, it has become clear that the benefit isn’t always reaching the intended community despite the best intentions.

Today we're talking to Angela Halliday about how she became Sodexo UK&I's first-ever Director of Social Impact, their approach to measurement and evaluation, and how you tell a coherent impact story in a large, complex, multinational, sector-spanning organisation.

Meet Carol Glenn, Social Value Programme Manager at Solihull Metropolitan Borough Council. We talk about perceptions of social value, challenges with measurement, and what makes some suppliers stand out with their social value story.

Here are our top red flags that social value isn’t working for your business. You may want to rethink your approach if you recognise any of these.

We spoke with Berry Jordan, Business and Community Investment Advisor at Vattenfall UK about windfarm and infrastructure projects, how community engagement is changing thanks to COVID-19, and why businesses benefit when communities do.

The G7’s landmark deal to tackle tax avoidance and crack down on multinational companies that treat our global economy as a financial rabbit warren might seem a welcome step in the right direction. But it's unlikely to make much of a difference until businesses start seeing tax as an investment opportunity instead of an unwelcome bill.

You are not alone if you think your organisation is struggling to measure social impact effectively. From obsessing about numbers to ignoring intrinsic problems within an organisation, such as how staff are treated or the carbon footprint of your supply chain, there are common problems we repeatedly encounter across the public and private sectors.

Today we're talking to Scott Collins about how to make the most of relationships with your suppliers, the difference that genuine dialogue and open communication can make to your ability to build a sustainable business, and how strong supplier relationships can help mitigate the impact of business interruption.

Today we're talking to Sarah Stone, Founder & Director at Samtaler. Sarah shares her views on social value, why she started Samtaler and where to begin on your social value journey.

Today we're talking to Chris White, the MP behind the Social Value Act that began life in 2010. Find out why the legislation is so vague; what role Labour's Hazel Blears played; and how it almost didn't come to pass as a Private Members Bill. We also discussed how the Act might come into its own post-Brexit.

If you’re a private sector organisation, good social value is about thinking about how you operate and what non-economic value you can create for your own stakeholders as part of your operations. These stakeholders can be external customers, such as the communities you serve or the people living in the places where you operate, but they also include internal stakeholders - one of the most important groups of which is your staff.

The public sector is one of the last to adopt new technologies, but what if it became an early adopter? The impact could be transformational, with a trillion pounds spent on procurement annually.