What are social value proxies — and where do the £ figures come from?

You've seen a social value report put a pound sign on a careers talk, a volunteer afternoon, an apprenticeship — and somewhere a quiet voice asks: where did that number come from? Fair question. If you're going to put a figure in a tender, you should know what's behind it. Here's the plain-English version.

A proxy is a price for something that was never sold

Most of what your business does in the community has real value but no price tag. Nobody invoices for the confidence a young person gains from a site visit, or the wellbeing boost a regular volunteer gets from feeling useful. A proxy value is an agreed, evidence-based estimate of what that outcome is worth in pounds — a stand-in price for a thing the market never put on sale.

So when a report says "this session delivered £X of social value", it isn't claiming someone handed over £X. It's saying: based on research into outcomes like this one, this is a recognised, consistent way to express the value in money — the common currency a buyer, funder or finance team actually understands.

Where the numbers come from

The credible proxy values used across the UK are built on wellbeing valuation — the approach the Treasury itself uses. The core unit is the WELLBY: a one-point change in someone's life satisfaction, on a 0–10 scale, held for one year. HM Treasury's supplementary Green Book guidance on wellbeing puts a central value of around £13,000 on a single WELLBY (in a range of £10,000–£16,000, 2021 prices). That's the official anchor a lot of social value figures trace back to.

From that foundation, libraries of ready-made proxies are built. The best known in the UK is the HACT UK Social Value Bank, a suite of around 88 outcomes — things like improved confidence, getting into employment, feeling part of a community — each with a defined money value derived from large national datasets. Instead of every organisation inventing its own price, everyone draws on the same recognised figures. That's what makes one report comparable to the next.

Why a recognised proxy beats a number you made up

You could guess. Plenty of bids do — a round number plucked from the air, with nothing underneath it. The problem shows up the moment an evaluator asks "how did you get there?" A figure with no source behind it is the easiest thing in a tender to discount.

A recognised proxy is different because it's consistent and traceable. Two organisations logging the same activity land on the same value. An evaluator can follow it back to a published source. And because social value is now a scored, weighted part of public buying — the Public Services (Social Value) Act 2012 made England and Wales the first place in the world to require public bodies to weigh it, and central-government tenders now carry a minimum weighting for it — a defensible figure is worth real marks, not just a nice line in a brochure.

One honest note: a costed proxy figure is an evidence-based estimate, not a bank statement. It's the professional, recognised way to express value — used by housing associations, contractors and funders across the country — but it's an estimate, and the credibility comes from using recognised values consistently rather than inventing your own.

What this means for you

You almost certainly already deliver social value — careers talks, work experience, volunteering, apprenticeships, community projects. The gap is never the activity. It's that the activity never gets costed against a recognised proxy and written down in a form a buyer accepts.

That's the bit Owl Impact does for you. Log what you did in about two minutes, and it's costed against recognised proxy values and turned into a clean, professional report you can drop straight into a tender, a framework return or an ESG update — no spreadsheet, no guesswork about the numbers.