Social Value Case Study: Orbit

Introduction 

In 2023, Orbit, one of the UK’s foremost housing groups commissioned HACT to help develop their Social Value Framework. Orbit manages a portfolio of quality, safe and affordable homes for over 100,000 customers and is a not-for-profit organisation committed to creating a better society, building affordable homes, and doing so in more socially responsible and sustainable ways. 

We spoke to Russell Smith, Social Sustainability Lead for Orbit, who explained how working with HACT has helped to inform the organisation’s journey towards becoming a best practice social value business. 

Background & challenge 

As a not-for-profit organisation, it’s important to us that we maximise the social value we deliver. It is a key element of our recently launched 2030 Corporate Strategy, where we set out our ambition to ‘provide amongst the best customer experience of any housing association in the country’, and a key performance indicator of our two sustainability linked loans, with ABN-AMRO and Barclays.   

Orbit has recorded its social value from its frontline services and supply chain for a number of years. To date we have delivered £61.5million in social value to our customers and society, and we have a commitment to deliver £100million worth of Social Value by 2025. However, whilst we are progressing well towards this target, we were confident we weren’t capturing the entirety of our impact.   

We reached out to HACT as we wanted to be able to accurately track Orbit’s Social Value to provide assurance to our lenders and the wider organisation and ensure our data capture methods were aligned with best practice. HACT offered us an audit of our reporting for the previous financial years 2021-22 and 22-23. 

Why HACT? 

We have been using HACT’s UK Social Value Bank for several years due to its applicability on social housing. One of the major benefits of using the UK Social Value Bank has been the ability to measure wellbeing value – having a tool that helps us measure the impact of our provision of quality affordable homes and services to customers and society is invaluable. It lets us know that we are making the kind of impact that really makes a difference to our customers.  

Following the successful certification of our social value delivery for previous financial years HACT recommended next steps including: 

• Developing an impact framework to measure and assess service performance and impact for service users, Orbit and in the community/society 
• Collecting new/additional data to create a more holistic assessment of impact 
• Developing enhanced data collection processes

Impact / benefit of working with HACT 

The main benefit has been a distinct focus on capturing the impact we make for our customers and society across our business.   With so many of our departments having different roles and engagement points with customers, it was important to understand how we can capture data to monitor Orbit’s impact, understand how we can improve performance in the future, and help us increase the impact we make. 

Conclusion 

• HACT’s collaboration with Orbit showcases a strategic approach to measuring and assuring social value, aligning with Orbit’s commitment to delivering £100 million of social value by 2025. 
• Through robust data analysis and consultation, HACT provided assurance on Orbit’s social value reporting, enhancing transparency and credibility for stakeholders, including sustainability linked loan providers. 
• HACT’s expertise facilitated the identification of areas for improvement and provided actionable recommendations, enabling Orbit to strengthen its social impact initiatives and decision-making processes. 
• The partnership highlighted the importance of clarity around wellbeing value, empowering Orbit to prioritise investments that maximise impact and drive meaningful change for customers and communities. 
• Moving forward, HACT recommended the development of an impact framework, enhanced data collection processes, and the collection of new/additional data to create a more comprehensive assessment of impact, ensuring sustained progress and effectiveness in Orbit’s social value initiatives.