The newly launched Aviva Investors’ Social Value Label recognises quality practice in the construction supply chain. It will be awarded to contractors who deliver social value when building commercial real estate.
Read this article to understand:
- The importance of social value in real estate
- How the Label can help achieve better outcomes for local communities
- How Aviva Investors will award the label to its contractors
The UK construction sector is facing significant workforce and skills shortages. The latest Office for National Statistics (ONS) figures show there are over 35,000 job vacancies in the sector. For over half of those, employers say they can’t find workers with the necessary skills – the highest rate of any sector.
The UK construction sector is facing significant workforce and skills shortages
This shortage will only grow as the government works to deliver more homes and infrastructure.1 The UK’s Construction Industry Training Board (CITB) estimates that 47,860 extra workers a year will need to be recruited between 2025 and 2029. That is a total of 239,300 workers, representing 1.8 per cent of the UK’s 2024 construction workforce.2
At the same time, bringing benefits to local stakeholders and communities and fostering trust are essential to the long-term success of investments in infrastructure and real estate.3 Helping local people gain skills and jobs is a key part of this.
What does social value look like for Aviva Investors?
We have implemented a comprehensive social value strategy across our building developments and established a social value steering group. The group comprises stakeholders from the Department for Work & Pensions (DWP), CITB, the Construction Youth Trust, the Central London Careers hub delivered by Reed in Partnership, Mace Consult, New City College and The Skills Centre.
For each of Aviva Investors’ development projects, the steering group determines how we can direct employment opportunities towards the local people who most need support.
As an asset manager, it’s not just about our own activities; we also collaborate with a network of suppliers and contractors. They too need to deliver social value for our projects to be successful. The steering group’s industry expertise helps to ensure this happens and that impact is maximised across our developments.
We also frequently provide contractors with coordinated support to help them deliver social value targets across three key workstreams: jobs and apprenticeships, skills and training, and education outreach. For example, we have covered the costs of coordinating a sector-based work academy and facilitating education outreach programmes specific to our development sites.
Between January 2023 and June 2025, this benefited more than 5,000 students nationwide.
Alongside this, we have developed the Social Value Label to help contractors and local authorities understand our intentions and expectations – and to recognise best practice.
Sylvie Sasaki, sustainability director for real estate at Aviva Investors, said: “As one of the largest investors in the UK, we recognise the role we can play in communities across the country. The Social Value Label sets a new benchmark for what good looks like in construction, and we’re proud to champion it.
“The label is a signal of our commitment to embedding long-term, meaningful impact into our developments. It reflects our belief that real estate should serve the communities they sit within.”
How does the label work?
For many companies in construction, social value can often be dismissed as a box-ticking exercise. This shifts the priority away from the actual goal of social value: improving people’s quality of life. To refocus efforts on what matters, we designed our label to recognise performance against not just project-level targets, but also a set of qualitative engagement criteria.
These look at how well contractors have done on delivering good outcomes for the people and communities living near our development projects. For example, they assess contractors’ quality of engagement with our steering group partners, their long-term partnerships with community groups, repeat engagements with the same individuals, and participation in targeted programmes we run.
“This label celebrates those who go above and beyond to deliver for local people,” said Sasaki. “With the UK construction sector facing a critical skills shortage, our Social Value Label helps spotlight the contractors who are actively investing in people through jobs, training, and education outreach.”
To develop the label, we consulted with our steering group members, particularly DWP, CITB and the Central London Careers hub delivered by Reed in Partnership, whose understanding of the complex challenges that drive unemployment, limit access to career opportunities, and restrict social mobility guided our efforts.
We then reviewed project data to understand delivery challenges. That enabled us to set boundaries for each of the labels – “core”, “impactful”, and “visionary” – and to design the scorecard.
Social value experts in our supply chain and the steering group – representing the UK government’s ambitions for the sector – assessed the resulting evaluation criteria for the labels.
In ascending order, the core, impactful and visionary labels are awarded based on:
- The delivery of social value targets (all).
- Meeting our evidence requirements with high-confidence data (all).
- Demonstrating clear links between social value outcomes and local needs (all).
- Quality engagement with delivery partners, such as employment, skills and training providers, Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) and Voluntary and Community Social Enterprises (VCSEs) (impactful, visionary).
- 17 criteria defining successful repeat outcomes for individuals and long-term partnerships with employment, skills and training providers, SMEs and VCSEs. Contractors will be awarded impactful status for delivery of up to 9 of 17 criteria, or visionary for 10 or more.
We have worked with the CITB to obtain accreditation for the labels from the National Skills Academy for Construction framework – one of 19 National Skills Academies that support UK industries by developing training infrastructure to address sector-specific skill gaps.4
Carl Licorish, customer engagement manager at CITB, said: “This partnership involving clients, providers and employers represents exactly the kind of collaboration the construction industry needs.
“When local communities connect directly with construction businesses, everyone wins – the industry gets the skilled workforce it desperately needs, and local people gain access to secure, well-paid jobs. It’s partnerships like this that will transform how our industry works.”
What are the benefits of the Social Value Label?
The label will recognise and promote the good practice of our construction supply chain.
We will use it as a simple way to communicate the aims of our social value programme to stakeholder groups, such as local planning authorities, for upcoming real estate projects.
We will use it as a simple way to communicate the aims of our social value programme
And contractors who receive a label will have the right to use it in their own marketing and future bids, to evidence their track record and proficiency when delivering social value.
We look forward to using these new standards in suitable construction projects to support our suppliers and contractors, help address the skill gap in UK construction, and improve local communities’ skills, jobs and quality of life.
“By working closely with our steering group and supply chain partners, we’re striving to embed social value as a shared mission, rather than just a contractual obligation,” said Sasaki.
