While the “S” in ESG may be five to 10 years behind its environmental counterpart in terms of legislation and regulation, changing consumer attitudes are fuelling a surge of interest in delivering – and measuring – social value.

With regulation like the Social Value Act on one side and developers trying to ensure support for planning on the other, there has been a proliferation of tools and frameworks to measure this – or at least try to. A wealth of consultancies offering varying levels of expertise can be quite confusing with question marks over some of the methodologies and around much of the data used.

The debate around whether we should be “calculating” social value with top down metrics, or taking into account each development’s unique qualities at an individual level sits at the heart of much of this.

Realistically, reporting requires varying approaches. But just as a report listing a portfolio’s EPC ratings doesn’t fully convey its climate risk, so too would any single metric fail to fully report social value.’

Calculation is important for simple comparative measures – granted. We don’t all have the time to become experts in social value and we certainly need simple explanations for local communities and for investors keen to meet growing levels of scrutiny.

While “pinning a number on it”, if done badly can be counter-productive, we live in a society that needs this kind of quick explanation – and that makes it comparable with other investment metrics. It creates methodologies that can be transferred from development to development and expressed at portfolio and company level by the owner.

Still, there are a number of reasons why we cannot just use numbers.

Expressing intangibles using metrics is an inexact science, and there are various schools of thought for what metrics should be used and they don’t all agree. Where proxy values are used the problem is that the values different people attach to the same thing may differ.