Build Defensible TOMs Claims: 7 Steps for UK Bid Teams

Social value TOMs stands for Themes, Outcomes and Measures, and it is the minimum reporting standard UK authorities use to score and evidence social value in tenders. Under the National TOMs framework, buyers set targets against agreed measures, bidders commit to numbers, and contract managers monitor delivery. The framework works alongside a measurement calculator and an evidence list, so scoring stays comparable across contracts and councils.

TL;DR:

• Most social value scores hinge on clear, measurable commitments that specify outcome counts, reporting methods, and geographic relevance.
• Authorities prioritize measures differently based on local strategy, requiring bidders to tailor weightings and focus on context-specific themes.
• Accurate valuation of social outcomes depends on proxy values, which must be justified with current, verifiable evidence, especially for place-based impacts.
• A strong, reusable evidence library reduces errors and improves transparency, enabling quick adaptation of past successful commitments for new tenders.
• Combining qualitative policy alignment with quantitative TOMs measurement ensures a complete, credible social value bid that meets both scoring criteria.

Table of Contents

• What social value TOMs actually mean in procurement
• How authorities use National TOMs in bid scoring
• Proxy values and the social value measurement calculator
• Additionality, attribution and the double-counting trap
• Where National TOMs meets the Social Value Model and PPNs
• A step-by-step approach to building a defensible TOMs claim
• Author perspective: a workflow that reduces TOMs risk
• Balancing standardisation and local priorities: an editorial view
• How Bidblock helps teams prepare TOMs-compliant bids
• Sources
• FAQ

What social value TOMs actually mean in procurement

Every National TOMs commitment sits inside a three-layer structure, and understanding that structure is the difference between a bid that scores well and one that gets marked down for vague promises.

Themes are the broad policy areas social value sits under: things like local jobs, wellbeing, environmental sustainability, and fair employment. Outcomes describe the change a bidder promises within a theme, such as "more residents move into sustainable employment." Measures are the countable units that prove the outcome happened, for example "number of local people supported into employment" or "number of apprenticeships created." A bidder who writes "we support the local community" has stated a theme with no outcome and no measure. A bidder who writes "we will create four apprenticeships for residents within 5 miles of the delivery site, tracked through payroll records" has given all three.

The National TOMs guidance was built with input from more than 40 institutions, which is why most UK authorities use it as their baseline rather than inventing their own measure sets from scratch. That consistency matters for bidders working across multiple councils: a measure defined one way in Manchester should mean the same thing in Kent.

Within the framework, measures are split into three sets:

• Core measures cover the outcomes procurers are told to prioritise nationally, such as local employment and SME spend.
• Non-core measures are optional but still standardised, letting an authority reflect a specific local priority without inventing a bespoke metric.
• Light measures, introduced to simplify smaller or lower-value contracts, reduce the reporting burden while keeping figures comparable.

The National TOMs 2022 update reorganised measures into exactly this core, non-core and light structure, and it tightened guidance on supply-chain reporting at the same time.

Two more terms appear constantly in TOMs documentation and are worth fixing early. Additionality asks whether an outcome would have happened anyway without the contract, and only the additional portion counts. Attribution asks how much of an outcome to credit when several organisations (a prime contractor, subcontractors, a training provider) all contributed. Get either wrong and a bid's social value figures collapse under scrutiny at contract review.

How authorities use National TOMs in bid scoring

Procuring authorities do not apply TOMs uniformly. Each contract carries its own prioritisation, meaning some themes and measures matter more than others depending on local strategy, and bidders need to read that prioritisation before drafting a single sentence.

1. The authority sets weightings. Using a prioritisation tool, the buyer decides which themes carry the most weight for this specific contract, an environmental scheme will weight carbon and biodiversity measures differently to a care contract weighting employment and wellbeing.
2. The ITT specifies expected measures. A well-written invitation to tender lists the exact measures bidders must respond against, often with a minimum threshold and sometimes a maximum credible target, to stop bidders inflating numbers to win points.
3. Bidders submit commitments with assumptions attached. Every figure needs a stated method: how it was calculated, over what period, and what proxy value or multiplier was used. An unqualified number is an easy target for a challenge from a competing bidder.
4. Evaluators score against the stated methodology, not just the headline figure. A modest but well-evidenced commitment often outscores an ambitious claim with no calculation trail, because evaluators are trained to distrust numbers that arrive without working.
5. Successful commitments convert into contract obligations. Once awarded, TOMs commitments typically move into the contract's performance schedule, meaning the promises made in the bid become monitored delivery obligations, not marketing copy.

Bidders should treat social value TOMs the same way they treat price: as a section that gets checked, not just read. That means naming the exact measure code from the National TOMs library where possible, stating the reporting period, and being explicit about whether a figure is direct delivery or supply-chain contribution. Authorities increasingly ask for this separation because blended figures are one of the fastest ways to lose marks on transparency criteria.

Contract management is where most of the real work happens after award. A social value commitment written into a bid needs a monitoring plan: who collects the evidence, how often it's reported, and what happens if delivery falls short. Bidders who build this monitoring plan into the bid response itself, rather than leaving it for later, tend to score better on deliverability questions.

Proxy values and the social value measurement calculator

The Social Value TOM System™ is the operational tool most authorities and bidders reference when they need to turn a TOMs commitment into a monetary figure. It maps National TOMs measures against a calculator, and it publishes an open-access core set of measures so bidders aren't working from guesswork.

A proxy value is a monetary estimate assigned to a social outcome that has no natural market price. There's no invoice for "resident feels less isolated," so the framework assigns a proxy value drawn from established wellbeing and economic research, letting an outcome like reduced isolation sit in the same financial language as a training budget line.

Running a calculation typically involves:

• Selecting the correct measure code for the outcome being claimed.
• Entering the raw count (number of people, hours, or units delivered).
• Applying the published proxy value for that measure.
• Applying a multiplier where the outcome is genuinely place-specific.

Bidders frequently misuse multipliers. A local multiplier (sometimes drawn from methodologies like LM3, which tracks how much of a contract's spend recirculates in a local economy) should only be applied when there is real evidence the value stays local, not as a default uplift to inflate a headline total.

Pro Tip: If your contract is place-bound, collect postcode-level data on beneficiaries or spend before you calculate anything. Without that geographic evidence, an evaluator or auditor has no way to check whether your local multiplier claim is real, and the National TOMs guidance is explicit that local data underpins any local uplift.

Where a project has particularly complex social outcomes, some bidders substitute a full Social Return on Investment (SROI) study instead of the standard proxy calculation. This is defensible, but it takes longer, needs its own evidence base, and should only replace the standard calculator when the contract genuinely warrants that level of rigour. For most tenders, the standard proxy values and calculator are what evaluators expect to see.

Transparency has limits here worth naming plainly: proxy values are estimates, not measured facts, and every serious bid response should record the exact proxy figure used, its source, and the date it was applied. Proxy values get revised periodically, and a bid using an outdated figure risks looking careless even when the underlying delivery is genuine.

Additionality, attribution and the double-counting trap

Additionality is the single most common reason a social value claim gets rejected or discounted at evaluation. The test is simple to state and hard to apply: would this outcome have happened without the contract? A construction firm that was already planning to hire three local apprentices before the tender was even published cannot claim those three as additional social value delivered through the contract.

Attribution becomes the harder problem the moment more than one organisation touches an outcome. Guidance in the 2021 National TOMs Framework recommends keeping separate records for direct delivery and supply-chain contribution rather than blending them into one number.

Common double-counting risks include:

• Claiming the same apprentice or job outcome under two different contract measures.
• A prime contractor claiming a subcontractor's delivered outcome as its own without attribution.
• Reporting the same volunteering hours against both a "community engagement" measure and a separate "wellbeing" measure.
• Carrying a prior contract's beneficiaries forward into a new contract's totals without checking for overlap.

The practical fix is an audit trail that exists independently of the bid document itself. That means dated evidence (timesheets, payroll extracts, signed partnership agreements) that ties a specific number to a specific measure and a specific contract period, kept somewhere a contract manager or auditor can actually retrieve it later.

Where National TOMs meets the Social Value Model and PPNs

Central government guidance treats social value as two related but distinct exercises, and confusing them is one of the more expensive mistakes a bid team can make. The Social Value Model, set out under PPN 002, is primarily a qualitative evaluation tool used to score policy alignment in central government contracts. National TOMs, by contrast, is built for quantitative measurement: the actual counting and monetising of delivered outcomes.

Government's own guide to using the Social Value Model makes clear that buyers still need a way to measure and report what gets delivered, even where the award criteria themselves are framed qualitatively. In practice, this means a central government contract might score a bid's social value approach against the Social Value Model's themes at award stage, then require TOMs-style measures for reporting once the contract is live.

For bid teams working across both central and local government, the practical mapping looks like this:

• Read the ITT carefully to see whether the authority is scoring against the Social Value Model themes, the National TOMs measure set, or a locally adapted version of either.
• Where the Social Value Model applies, write policy-aligned qualitative responses first, then attach TOMs-style measures as supporting evidence of deliverability.
• Where National TOMs applies directly, lead with the measure codes and proxy calculations, since that is what evaluators will be scoring against line by line.
• Never assume the two frameworks are interchangeable; a response written purely in Social Value Model language will often score poorly against a TOMs-scored local authority contract, and vice versa.

A step-by-step approach to building a defensible TOMs claim

Getting from a blank ITT to a scored, delivered social value commitment follows a fairly consistent sequence, whether the contract is a £200,000 grounds maintenance deal or a nine-figure infrastructure framework.

1. Read the prioritisation before drafting anything. Identify which themes the authority has weighted highest, and check whether they've specified core, non-core, or light measures for this contract.
2. Select realistic measures and targets. Match your organisation's genuine delivery capacity to the measure codes on offer, don't commit to a number you can't evidence twelve months later just because it looks strong on paper.
3. Gather the evidence types you'll need in advance. This typically means timesheets, payroll extracts, local recruitment records, signed supplier invoices, and partnership agreements with any subcontractor delivering part of the commitment.
4. Build the calculation with visible assumptions. State the proxy value used, the multiplier applied (and why), the reporting period, and whether the figure is direct or supply-chain delivery.
5. Separate your evidence into three layers. Keep a calculation workbook (the maths), a corroborating evidence folder (the proof), and a short narrative that ties the intervention to the measure, this separation is what makes an audit or contract review fast rather than painful.
6. Write a monitoring plan into the bid itself. Name who collects the data, how often, and what escalation happens if a target is missed, evaluators score deliverability, not just ambition.
7. Hand the commitment to contract management with the paperwork attached. A TOMs commitment that only exists in the bid document, disconnected from whoever manages the live contract, is the single most common reason delivery falls short of what was promised.

Pro Tip: Draft your calculation workbook and evidence folder as separate documents from day one, even during the bid stage. Bid teams that merge maths and evidence into one messy spreadsheet almost always struggle to reconstruct their assumptions when a contract manager asks for proof eighteen months into delivery.

Author perspective: a workflow that reduces TOMs risk

The pattern behind most weak TOMs submissions isn't a lack of good intentions, it's a lack of retrievable evidence. Organisations delivering genuinely strong social value often still write vague commitments because nobody centralised the proof from their last three contracts.

An evidence library, built once and reused across bids, solves this directly. Instead of reconstructing an apprenticeship figure from memory every time a new ITT lands, a bid team pulls the same verified case from a structured library, checks it still meets the additionality test for the new contract, and adjusts the numbers rather than starting from a blank page.

Picture a mid-sized facilities contractor bidding for a regional NHS estates framework. Two years earlier, they delivered a local employment scheme on a similar contract, but the only record was a project manager's memory and a partially archived spreadsheet. Structured against an evidence library, that same scheme becomes a repeatable template: the measure code, the proxy value used, the payroll evidence, and the monitoring approach are all sitting ready to be adapted rather than rebuilt.

A short checklist any bid team can adopt immediately:

• Store every past social value commitment against its specific measure code, not just a general description.
• Tag evidence by contract, date, and whether it's direct delivery or supply-chain contribution.
• Keep proxy values and multipliers logged alongside the evidence that justifies them.
• Review the additionality test on every reused case before submitting it against a new contract.

This is the exact gap Bidblock's evidence library is built to close, turning scattered historical delivery into structured, reusable proof for the next tender.

Balancing standardisation and local priorities: an editorial view

National TOMs earns its place as the default because comparability matters, an authority scoring twenty bids needs measures that mean the same thing across all twenty. But treating the national set as the ceiling rather than the floor is where bid teams undersell themselves and authorities undersell their communities.

The stronger approach uses National TOMs as the baseline and adds locally sourced measures only where genuine stakeholder engagement has surfaced a real, otherwise unmeasured priority, a specific skills gap, a transport barrier, a particular cohort underserved by existing schemes. That takes more work than ticking core measures and moving on, but it also produces sharper additionality, because a measure built from an actual local gap is far harder to dismiss as business-as-usual.

The risk running the other way is real too: authorities that over-prescribe bespoke local targets without consulting bidders on deliverability often get commitments nobody can actually evidence at contract review. Standardisation exists precisely to stop that.

*— Syed

How Bidblock helps teams prepare TOMs-compliant bids

Most bid teams lose marks on social value TOMs not because their delivery is weak, but because the evidence is scattered across old spreadsheets, inboxes, and someone's memory of a contract from two years ago. An evidence library is built to close exactly that gap.

An evidence library lets teams store past delivery examples, measure codes, and proxy calculations in one structured place, so a strong apprenticeship or local employment case from a previous contract can be pulled up, checked for additionality, and adapted for a new ITT in minutes rather than days. Accreditation checks and organised response templates sit alongside that library, helping teams present TOMs commitments with the assumptions and calculations evaluators expect to see. For contracts where the numbers get complex, working alongside a consultancy such as TLC Consulting on finance and compliance detail can add another layer of confidence.

If your team is preparing a bid with a heavy social value weighting, start structuring your evidence with Bidblock before the next ITT lands, not after the deadline is already ticking.

Sources

Every serious TOMs calculation should be checked against primary guidance rather than a summary, since proxy values and measure definitions get revised and a bid built on an outdated figure is an easy mark to lose.

The National TOMs guidance remains the foundational document defining Themes, Outcomes and Measures, while the National TOMs 2022 update sets out the current core, non-core and light measure structure and clarified supply-chain reporting rules. The Social Value TOM System™ provides the operational calculator and open-access core measure set bidders use to turn commitments into figures. For the policy side, PPN 002 and its Social Value Model guide explain how central government frames qualitative evaluation alongside measurement expectations. Bookmark all four; between them, they cover definitions, calculation, and scoring policy.

• National TOMs guidance (Local Government Association)
• Guide to using the Social Value Model (GOV.UK)
• National TOMs 2022 update guidance

FAQ

What are TOMs in social value?

TOMs stands for Themes, Outcomes and Measures, the structure the National TOMs framework uses to define, target, and evidence social value commitments in UK contracts.

What is social value in the UK?

Social value refers to the wider social, economic, and environmental benefit a contract generates beyond its core deliverable, things like local jobs, wellbeing improvements, or reduced carbon impact, measured and scored as part of public procurement.

What is the UK Social Value Model?

The Social Value Model is central government's qualitative framework for evaluating social value in the award of central government contracts, distinct from the National TOMs framework used for quantitative measurement.

Is social value a legal requirement?

Social value must be explicitly considered in the award of central government contracts under PPN 002, and many local authorities apply similar requirements through their social value policies, though the specific weighting and measures vary by contract.

How do TOMs relate to a bid's evidence requirements?

TOMs commitments need supporting evidence, such as payroll extracts, timesheets, and partnership agreements, tied to the specific measure claimed. Tools like Bidblock's evidence library help bid teams keep that proof organised and reusable across submissions.