Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, whether her Department plans to require local authority bus operators to run procurement operations with Government money that include consideration of social value weighting.

My Department recognises the importance of social value in public procurement, and government procurement policy requires Central Government Departments to apply a minimum 10% weighting. Whilst this 10% minimum weighting is not mandatory for Local Authorities, many already apply this voluntarily.

The UK Bus Manufacturing Expert Panel, which ran from March 2025 to March 2026, concluded with a set of agreed mayoral commitments on zero emission buses including:

• To apply a minimum 10% social value weighting in all future bus procurement tenders, with yearly reviews on the weighting informed by data and lessons learned from bus fleet procurement exercises.
• To agree a consistent approach to social value, capturing and delivering UK wide benefits in addition to local benefits, where relevant and proportionate, in future bus fleet procurement tenders.
• To develop best practice social value questions, which could be used as a standardised base questionnaire in future tender documents, ensuring consistency and transparency, by September and in time to inform the next large bus fleet MCA procurement exercises.

The agreed commitments, can be found here: link.