HyNet is £2bn of supply chain work on your doorstep — is your social value on paper?

If you run a contracting, plant, engineering or trades business in North Wales or the North West, the biggest procurement story on your doorstep isn't a framework in London — it's the ground being dug in Flintshire and Cheshire right now. HyNet, the carbon capture and hydrogen cluster spanning the two regions, is moving from paper into construction, and it is pulling a very large supply chain along with it.

The scale, in plain numbers

The UK government confirmed HyNet will support 2,800 direct, skilled jobs — engineers, construction workers and technical roles — across North Wales and North West England, part of a £21.7bn national commitment to carbon capture, with £9.4bn committed this parliament (GOV.UK, Aug 2025). The transport and storage backbone alone is expected to unlock around £2bn of supply chain contracts and roughly 2,000 construction jobs (Pipeline Technology Journal).

This is not abstract. United Living won a £250m contract to build the CO₂ pipeline — 34km running from Ince in Cheshire to Point of Ayr in North Wales — and expects to add around 300 roles plus a further 300 through its direct supply chain (Construction Enquirer). Saipem, building the Point of Ayr compression station, has said it will procure over 1,000 local roles during construction. That is a lot of subcontracts, plant hire, groundworks, logistics and professional services flowing down to firms already based in the region.

How SMEs get on the list

Tier 1 contractors don't build any of this alone — they buy from local supply chains. HyNet runs a supplier registration route for exactly this, so North Wales and North West businesses can put themselves in front of the projects before packages are let. You can register your capability on the HyNet supply chain page. If you've done the Wylfa SMR supplier portal, this is the same idea — get visible early, before the buyers go looking.

Why social value decides who wins the subcontract

Here's the part most SMEs miss. Major infrastructure buyers don't just score you on price and programme — they score you on the community benefit you bring, and increasingly they require you to flow those commitments down through your own subcontracts. In Wales, socially responsible procurement duties are now live and reported annually, so the main contractors on a project like HyNet have to evidence the social value their supply chain delivers, not just their own.

That means when a Tier 1 asks what you contribute locally, "we're a good local firm" won't cut it. The firms that stand out answer with a costed figure: the apprentices taken on, the school careers talks delivered, the local labour and spend, the community work your team already does. Most contractors are doing this — they just have nothing on paper when the question comes.

Put your social value on paper before you're asked

That's the whole point of Owl Impact. Log an activity — a site team's school visit, an apprenticeship, a community project — and you get back a costed social value report built on recognised proxy values, ready to drop into a supplier prequalification, a meet-the-buyer pack or a subcontract bid. It takes about two minutes, and the report is professional evidence, not an anecdote.

HyNet is a decade-long build. The firms that win the repeat work will be the ones who can show, month after month, what they put back into North Wales and the North West — in pounds. Start the record now, while the packages are still being let.