The Postcode Playbook

Every postcode, in three weeks

In a matter of weeks, “every postcode” became the phrase the centre of government organises around.

On 21 July 2026, a machinery of government statement established No.10 North as “the engine room of devolution and good growth in every postcode,” pulling local economic growth and devolution strategy out of MHCLG and the Treasury and into the centre. On 5 August, the Cabinet Office redefined social value in central government contracts as “taking account of how a supplier will work for our communities to provide good British jobs, skills and opportunities in every postcode” (PPN 026). Both build on the Office for the Impact Economy, launched in November 2025 to put place at the centre of impact capital.

The Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, reduced the procurement change to a single test: when a business bids for a government contract, is it creating British jobs, and is it giving young people the skills they need? The £90bn spent each year, he said, should support jobs, skills and people in every postcode.

The shared word is postcode. Across all three instruments, government is choosing to direct money and strategy by where it lands, not only by what it buys or funds. That makes geography, at a fine grain, the thing being measured.

Why a playbook

Government runs its commercial decisions through playbooks. Two now sit either side of the same question, whether to buy a service or to deliver it directly.

The Sourcing Playbook (first published 2021, last updated 15 June 2026) is the repeatable method for how government buys: make-or-buy decisions, market health, delivery model assessment, KPIs, risk allocation and pricing, and management of the commercial lifecycle. Its social value component predates PPN 026 and will be overtaken by the new model from January 2027.

Its sister guide, published on 17 June 2026, is PPN 024, the Public Interest Test and insourcing strategy. It is the method for the opposite decision: whether a service is better delivered in-house. It sets a two-part Public Interest Test, asks departments spending £100m or more a year on contracts to hold a five-year Insourcing Strategy, and tells practitioners to weigh whole-life cost, resilience, local investment and the impact on local communities, not price alone.

Both answer a commercial question: make or buy. Neither, on its own, establishes where the money lands.

Why a postcode playbook?

Postcode data explorers available now

SDWH is publishing postcode-level analysis. The community finance explorer is public; the care explorers, with location-by-location detail, are members’ resources.

Search by postcode for deprivation indices across all four UK nations, and filter between local authority and parliamentary constituency. To request members’ access, or to discuss applying these layers to a specific place or portfolio, please get in touch.

What the rules now reward

Procurement is where the postcode test bites first. Social value applies to central government contracts above £1m: part of the roughly £90bn of contracts central government lets each year, within a public sector procurement bill approaching £400bn. From 1 January 2027, departments will score it in every such contract. For contracts of £5m and above, the weighting doubles, from 10% to 20% of the assessment. The model is stripped back to two outcomes, good jobs and skills, across six award criteria.

Two of the six criteria, on training and on building a talent pipeline, reward suppliers who reach “areas of multiple deprivation.” The scoring now turns on knowing where those areas are. That is a mapping question before it is a procurement question. A contracting authority that wants to award those points, and a supplier that wants to win them, both need to see deprivation at the level the contract is delivered.

PPN 026 will report through machinery the Procurement Act already provides: KPIs and performance published on the central digital platform, the Find a Tender service, under sections 52 and 71 of the Procurement Act. That reporting is still bedding in. In its one-year review of Find a Tender data, the Open Contracting Partnership found that 4.7% of contracts carried any KPI, rising to 28% for contracts above £5 million, with the first contract performance notice appearing at the end of February 2026.

Impact investment

Two strands of policy now point at the same postcodes.

1. Public procurement: social value attaches jobs, skills and training to the places a contract touches.
2. Impact investment: government is working to channel institutional and charitable money into communities, through the Office for the Impact Economy as a single front door, and is actively promoting the expansion of community finance. It estimates the impact economy is worth £106 billion to the UK.

The question is how to generate complementary benefits to multiply impact. The answer runs in two parts.

First, there is a delivery market already in place. On the government’s own definition, 6.2% of UK small businesses, around 347,000 organisations, are social enterprises: bodies that trade, and reinvest the surplus in a social mission. Most are micro, and many are rooted in the places policy is trying to reach. These are the grass roots that turn a social value commitment into jobs and training on a specific street. The Social Impact Investment Advisory Group set out a “staircase model” for how different forms of capital, from grants to social investment to institutional money, work together to move these organisations toward maturity and scale, matched to the needs of different places.

Second, there is a timing issue. A government supplier’s social value commitment funds programmes, in education, training and work experience, that are to be delivered in the specific areas a contract reaches, and may rely on local delivery partners. Those partners have to exist, and be ready, when the contract lands. Institutional impact capital, meanwhile, is looking for somewhere to invest, and return value over time. The opportunity is for that capital to provide the upfront funding to expand delivery capacity ahead of the procurement demand, so that when the social value commitment arrives there is something in the right postcode to deliver it.

This is a complex market of flows and partners: a procurement that must create jobs, jobs that can only be created in particular places, delivery partners who need capital before the contract exists, and investors who need places to deploy. A Postcode Playbook maps those flows and partners, so the two strands reinforce each other rather than pass in the night.

Sources

1. No.10 North / Machinery of Government Changes, HLWS298, 21 July 2026. questions-statements.parliament.uk
2. PPN 026: The Social Value Model, 5 August 2026. gov.uk
3. PPN 026 model text (Annex A). gov.uk
4. “Government orders that public spending must back British jobs and skills in every postcode,” 5 August 2026. gov.uk
5. Office for the Impact Economy. gov.uk
6. “Local communities set to benefit as new Office for the Impact Economy…,” 11 November 2025. gov.uk
7. Final report of the Social Impact Investment Advisory Group (SIIAG). gov.uk
8. Social enterprise: market trends 2023 (DCMS). gov.uk
9. Central Digital Platform and Publication of Information (Cabinet Office guidance, 5 May 2026). gov.uk
10. Open Contracting Partnership, “The UK Procurement Act one year on: what does the data tell us?” 3 March 2026. open-contracting.org
11. The Green Book: appraisal and evaluation in central government. gov.uk
12. The Magenta Book: central government guidance on evaluation. gov.uk
13. Managing Public Money (HM Treasury, April 2026 version). gov.uk
14. The Sourcing Playbook (Cabinet Office / Government Commercial Function; first published 20 May 2021; last updated 15 June 2026). gov.uk
15. PPN 024: The Public Interest Test and insourcing strategy (Cabinet Office, published 17 June 2026). gov.uk
16. HM Treasury Green Book, the Five Case Model (Strategic, Economic, Commercial, Financial, Management). gov.uk
17. Andy Burnham (Prime Minister), LinkedIn, “We’re changing the rules…” (background).
18. FT, “UK to strip back procurement rules to focus on job creation, says Louise Haigh,” 4 August 2026 (background).