PPN 06/20 and the social-value advantage of being employee-owned

Public-sector procurement under PPN 06/20 requires bidders to evidence social value as a weighted bid criterion — typically 10%, sometimes higher. Most contractors treat that 10% as a creative-writing exercise. They write about community investment in the abstract, point at a charity partnership, and hope the marker is sympathetic. Increasingly, the marker isn’t.

What changed isn’t the weight. It’s the rigour. Procurement teams have got better at noticing when social-value claims aren’t evidenced structurally — when they’re aspirational rather than operational. And when the work in question is life-safety, the asymmetry between aspirational and operational gets uncomfortable fast.

The structural argument an EOT carries

An employee-ownership trust isn’t a social-value flourish. It’s an ownership structure. The Trust holds the shares; the employees are the beneficiaries; the deferred consideration to the original sellers runs over years. None of that requires a press release — it’s evidenced on Companies House, in the trust deed, in the PAYE returns showing the annual tax-free bonus going to the workforce.

That matters for two reasons:

• It survives scrutiny. A community-investment narrative can be unpicked in conversation. An ownership structure can’t.
• It scales with the contract. The bigger the work, the more the workforce shares in it — by design. Most social-value mechanisms have the opposite property: they get harder to honour as the contract scales.

“A community-investment narrative can be unpicked in conversation. An ownership structure can’t.”

Why this matters more in life-safety than elsewhere

Public-sector buyers procuring fire safety, security, or compliance work carry asymmetric risk. The downside of picking a supplier who fails is reputational and regulatory, not financial. Social-value weighting, in that context, isn’t really about social value — it’s a proxy for “this supplier is anchored”. Anchoring is exactly what an EOT structurally produces: the workforce can’t be sold out from under a contract, the leadership can’t be pressured into a fire-sale exit, the operating focus stays with the operating company.

Procurement teams who understand this don’t ask EOT suppliers to evidence social value the same way they ask private-equity-backed suppliers to. They ask the structural questions instead — and EOTs answer them with documents the regulator could verify.

The bottom line

Most direct competitors in life-safety and compliance are private-equity backed or owner-managed. Neither structure carries the social-value argument in the same way. EOTs do — not because of what they say, but because of what they are. For a procurement team scoring a tender against PPN 06/20, that distinction is becoming the easiest 10% in the document.

Jamie Dawson is Chair of AMPM Group. Gemini AMPM, the group’s flagship trading subsidiary, has been an employee-owned trust since October 2024.