The Home Office is the UK’s Government Department responsible for public safety and policing, border security, and immigration. It is one of the UK’s largest Departments with over 50 000 employees.
The Home Office is an EIDA Beacon member and a procurement specialist, issuing contracts worth over £3 billion annually. They place 10% of their contract weightings on the contractor’s social values, enough to determine a successful bid in many cases. A key consideration for social value criteria is that they are fair and do not disadvantage small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).
The Home Office Procurement team decided to integrate requirements for a workplace response to domestic abuse among their social value criteria and began the process of testing new domestic abuse-specific criteria with their existing supply chain. They also secured support from the Cabinet Office, relating the updated criteria to the Government’s mission “Take back our streets”. After positive feedback, the current Procurement Policy Note 002: The Social Value Model was developed. It contains four criteria directly related to domestic abuse, including training for employees, awareness-raising internally and externally, and implementing a domestic abuse policy.
PPN 02 is now available for implementation by all Government Departments in their respective procurement processes, and the Home Office has received positive feedback from their supply chain after its launch. The Home Office is looking to strengthen the criteria and build in frameworks for impact measurement.
Insights for employers:
- When developing your workplace response to domestic abuse, it is crucial to ensure that there is support for your own employees first. Once this has been implemented successfully and you are ready to progress to Phase Four as outlined in the EIDA Handbook, you can consider how your organisation may extend the response externally – whether it is through customers, partners, supply chains, and/or work in your community.
- Meeting social value requirements is always about fostering genuinely equitable, inclusive, and safe workplaces. A domestic abuse response needs to be embedded across your organisation to be effective - rather than a tick-box exercise purely to satisfy a procurement process.
- Consider how you might measure the impact of your response, both internally, and externally by liaising with customers, clients and partners. You can view the EIDA Business Case document (available through this page) to set actionable objectives. Our 2024 Conference session summary on achieving and measuring impacts also contains guidance for how employers can evaluate their domestic abuse response.
May 2025
EIDA Beacon insight
