Yesterday, the government announced that public spending will judge suppliers on the skills and jobs they create. From January 2027, local social value's weighting on government contracts worth £5m or more doubles, from 10% to 20%. Every organisation bidding for a share of the £90bn spent on public contracts each year will now score points for building good jobs, tackling local skills shortages, and helping young people into work.

We welcome it. Here's why, and what it means if your organisation bids for public sector contracts.

Why we welcome the government's procurement changes

For years, social value in procurement has worked like a form to fill in rather than a promise to keep. First Secretary of State Louise Haigh put it plainly: it's "been a tick box exercise that fails to deliver the positive change that people feel in their pocket and see in the places they live." Skills and jobs are now worth a fifth of the score on major contracts: enough to decide who wins.

Two priorities stand out to us.

The first is the focus on young people not in education, employment or training (NEET). Over a million under-25s in the UK currently fall into this group and we’ve published our own plans to support that group here. A procurement rule that specifically rewards suppliers for building pathways for young people is a direction worthy of support.

The second is the accountability mechanism. For major contracts, government departments will increase transparency for performance against these goals and publish annual progress reports. This makes it doubly important that social value commitments are actually upheld.

This is procurement finally rewarding the organisations that build real capability in their workforce, not just the ones that write a good bid.

How Multiverse already invests in skills and early talent

We've worked in this space for ten years, training over 40,000 learners with 1,600+ employer partners, including more than 150 public sector organisations such as NHS Trusts, local councils and police forces. In June, we announced a new AI-first early talent apprenticeship launching this September, aimed at exactly the group this policy is designed to reach: young people who need AI and data skills to compete in today’s job market.

None of this is new work for us. It's the same work, with government now backing it through how it spends £90bn a year.

What the new social value rules mean if you bid for government contracts

If your organisation supplies central government, or wants to, this is worth building into your strategy now.

From January 2027, a fifth of the score on contracts of £5m or more will come from local benefit, including skills development, apprenticeships and support for young people. That means the strength of a company’s commitment to workforce development, backed by real numbers, becomes a genuine differentiator in the bid itself. Vague commitments to social value won't hold up against a competitor who can show concrete plans. 

Three things are worth doing before the rules take effect:

• Get your skills investment measurable. If you can't show pay rises, promotions, or productivity gains linked to training, you can't evidence it in a bid.

• Build youth pathways now, not after you've won the contract. Suppliers will likely benefit from a credible pipeline for NEETs and young people before they're asked to prove one.

• Treat public reporting as part of the deal. The government will hold suppliers to their commitments publicly. Bids should only promise what can be delivered and shown.

This is the same discipline we apply to our own impact reporting. Our 2026 Impact Hub shows what that looks like in practice: 57% of our learners gain a promotion, pay rise or increased responsibility, and 77% say their programme made them more productive.

Backing British jobs and skills, together

Public spending backing British jobs and skills, in every postcode, is a change worth supporting. We've built our business around the same premise: that skills investment produces measurable returns for people, employers and the country. Government just decided to score for it.

If you're preparing a bid and want to talk through what a credible skills and early talent story looks like, get in touch.

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Europe has hit an inflection point. AI infrastructure spend has run into the billions, but economic growth hasn't followed.

High interest rates, tight fiscal policy and a stubborn productivity problem is the backdrop every business leader is working against right now.

And that’s why the AI mandate has shifted. Experimentation is over. Outcomes are everything.

Every year, we produce an Impact Report - like an annual report, but without the finance charts. It describes, through data, the outcomes we’ve driven for our learners and for our customers, through developing their capabilities in tech, data and AI.

And this year's Impact Report focuses on the metric that matters most in the age of AI: productivity.

Skills are the engine of productivity

We believe skills drive economic output, and our data backs this belief. Every pound and every hour invested in workforce capability feeds a flywheel: pay rises and job security for people, efficiency and revenue for employers, and higher, more sustainable growth for the country. Break the cycle at any point and everyone loses out.

But there’s challenging context to this too. Employer investment in training has fallen by nearly £10 billion in real terms over the past decade. And more than a quarter of employer vacancies today are skills related.

We want to change that.

Our impact in numbers

Across 40,000+ learners and 1,600+ employer partners, we've tracked £2bn+ in confirmed ROI.

Last year alone, Multiverse learners generated £340m in projected revenue and £557m in projected cost savings for their employers, as well as saving two working months per learner through efficiency gains.

That's £181,970 in projected financial return per learner.

Meanwhile 77% said their programme made them more productive, and 57% secured a promotion, pay rise or increased responsibility - pushing them up the career ladder.

Data, not dreams.

Real people, real outcomes

Behind every stat is someone who used new skills to move their career forward. Take Cali who went from experiencing homelessness at 21 to having a Data Analyst role created for her by her employer today. She built a chat app for an internal function now used by more than 2,000 people across her organisation - and her employer took notice.

Or Olly, an AI learner at brickmaker Michelmersh. Through Multiverse's AI programme, he moved from learner to leader, helping his team use Microsoft Fabric to cut gas consumption and energy costs. "I can analyse what's happening on the factory floor and connect it to the wider business strategy," he says. "That shift in perspective is what got me promoted."

Built for employers who want proof, not promises

More than half of CEOs say AI isn't delivering. But we think the question was never whether AI works. It was whether the workforce was equipped in how to use it.

One in three FTSE 100 organisations, 70% of Russell Group universities and 100+ NHS Trusts have worked with us to make that change. And every learner is backed by our 240+ coaches and instructors, as well as our AI coach, Atlas, which has fielded 2.25m chats from 25,000+ users to date.

Skills are a cause of economic growth, not a by-product. This report shows what happens when organisations, and the people inside them, treat capability building like the investment it is.

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The workload of a teacher can be incredibly demanding: beyond delivering lessons, there’s planning, administrative work, student support, and countless other tasks competing for time. All this can quickly become unmanageable.

As a Multiverse coach working with an education charity, Rachel O'Hehir sees this first-hand. “What every teacher has told me is just how demanding their role is,” Rachel explains. “They’re under a lot of pressure which can easily lead to burnout. So, removing the administrative burden is a no-brainer, allowing teachers to reinvest that time into what’s important.” 

Teachers lose 2-3 hours each week on manually preparing and reformatting slide decks, so it was no surprise that one teacher Rachel was coaching wanted to find a smarter way of working. That’s why she enlisted the help of AI to transform the way lessons are planned.

She built a new AI tool: a slide engine that automatically creates lesson decks, applies standard formatting templates, and pulls in the government-required literacy and vocabulary homework content.

“By inputting all the key resources needed for a lesson, teachers receive a slide deck that’s 80% ready for teaching,” Rachel explains, “and from there, they can easily tailor each deck to make sure it’s ready for different lessons and students.”

With the heavy-lifting done for them, the slide engine saves teachers at least an hour a week each – a massive cumulative saving of time across the organisation. It also enforces quality control, automatically integrating school and government requirements without creating extra work.

“At the minute, it’s the teacher’s department using the tool, but the plan is to roll it out to the wider organisation, and ultimately the wider federation of academies, based on how successful she and the team have found it.” A huge achievement for her and her fellow teachers.