Assessing the Impact of Leveraging Procurement to Reduce Child Poverty
City: North East Combined Authority, United Kingdom (fellow to be based in Newcastle, England)
Reporting to: Inclusive Economy Advisor
The Challenge
The North East Combined Authority (NECA) is a new unit of regional government formed in 2024, serving about 2.2 million residents of seven local councils within northeastern England. Kim McGuinness, the North East’s first mayor, has made addressing child poverty her number one priority. About 30 percent of young people in the area grow up in financial hardship, creating barriers to their own economic advancement and to the region’s overall prospects for growth. This figure is greater than the UK average of 21.8 percent of children living within households with an income below the national median before accounting for housing costs. In September 2024, NECA set up the country’s first Child Poverty Reduction Unit, and later began piloting strategies to help families pay for childcare. In July 2025, the NECA cabinet approved an ambitious five-year child poverty action plan—the most comprehensive and coordinated regional intervention of its kind in England—and invested £28.6 million ($38.5 million) toward implementing it.
Part of NECA’s strategy is to leverage its purchasing power (and that of the seven local councils within the region as well as private partners) to advance the mayor’s goal of reducing child poverty. Procurement is more than a transactional process that seeks to deliver value for money. It also shapes the regional economy and, by extension, how people live, work, and thrive. Under the UK’s Public Services (Social Value) Act 2012, public bodies are required to ensure that their procurement activities deliver additional economic, social, and environmental benefits beyond the core goods or services being purchased. NECA is aligning its procurement process to an ambition that the region becomes a place where every baby, child, and young person is supported to thrive and achieve their potential. This requires all organisations they do business with to meet standards for responsible employment and break down barriers to opportunity. Furthermore, NECA wants to embed an approach which ensures that social value in procurement is effectively leveraged to maximise regional progress in reducing levels of child poverty.
Now, NECA aims to evaluate what impact this approach to procurement is producing and what if any adjustments need to be made. More broadly, regional leaders also hope to identify lessons for other jurisdictions on how to leverage procurement to achieve social goals, in accordance with the UK government’s “Social Value Model.”
Key questions include:
- How can NECA make sure that every penny it spends contributes to the goal of addressing child poverty in the region?
- What are the quantitative and qualitative impacts of NECA’s procurement policy?
- How can contractors be assessed to make sure their operations and hiring practices support the goals of reducing child poverty?
- How can local jurisdictions within the region align their purchasing with NECA’s goals around reducing child poverty?
- What can be learned more broadly about social value approaches to public procurement?
What You’ll Do
The fellow will research the impact so far of leveraging procurement to reduce child poverty in the North East, and make actionable recommendations for ways of improving the approach in the future. The fellow also will research the broader landscape of how to use public-sector and cross-sector procurement to advance social value goals in the UK. This will involve engaging with key stakeholders from NECA administration, all seven local authorities, and national policy leaders. Other stakeholders to be engaged include elected leadership, council leadership, relevant consultants, private sector companies who contract with NECA, nonprofit organizations, and regional network organizations, such as the North East Chamber of Commerce, representing businesses across the North East.
Key deliverables include:
- A Research report evaluating the social value outcomes achieved to date overall, and specific outcomes related to the mayor’s priority of reducing child poverty.
- Identifying and designing ways to strengthen NECA’s approach, ensuring that it delivers meaningful impact against the mayor’s priority.
- An options paper proposing a consistent and strategic approach to designing social value into procurement exercises, guided by the UK Government’s Social Value Model.
- A research report and options paper on approaches to extend consistent and strategic public-sector and cross-sector approaches to social value for a region.
What You’ll Bring
The fellow will be expected to possess the following skills:
- Data Analysis
- Design Thinking
- Financial Modeling
- Policy Analysis
- Qualitative Interviewing and Analysis
