The landscape, untangled

Community wealth building

Community wealth building (CWB) is the wider economic approach the others increasingly sit under in Scotland. Its aim is to keep more of a place's wealth circulating locally — through progressive procurement, fair work, local supply chains, and the productive use of land and assets — rather than letting it leak away. Community benefits are one of the practical tools that progressive procurement uses.

It is now statutory. The Community Wealth Building (Scotland) Act 2026 received Royal Assent on 25 March 2026, described as the first national community-wealth-building legislation in the world. It requires local authorities and relevant public bodies to prepare, publish and implement a community wealth building action plan, with "have regard" obligations placed on a wider set of bodies.

Community benefits are a means; community wealth building is one of the ends. A well-specified community benefit is community wealth building made concrete in a single contract.

Inclusive growth

Inclusive growth is a policy goal rather than a procurement mechanism: growth whose benefits — jobs, skills, opportunity — are shared more fairly across people and places. It sets the direction. Community benefits are one of the levers that help deliver it: a local apprenticeship or a subcontracting opportunity for a regional SME is inclusive growth happening at the level of a single contract.

Sustainable procurement and the Scottish Model of Procurement

This is the legal frame community benefits sit inside. The same Procurement Reform (Scotland) Act 2014 that defines community benefit requirements also contains the sustainable procurement duty — the duty to buy in a way that improves the economic, social and environmental wellbeing of the authority's area, acts to reduce inequality, and promotes innovation.

Underpinning it is the Scottish Model of Procurement, which treats value not as lowest price but as the best balance of cost, quality and sustainability. Community benefits are a standard way of building that "sustainability and quality" dimension into a contract and then holding a supplier to it.

Fair Work First

Fair Work First is the Scottish Government's policy of using public spending — including grants and procurement — to drive fair employment practices, such as paying at least the real Living Wage and offering secure, decent work. It overlaps with community benefits without being the same thing: a recruitment or training commitment can carry Fair Work expectations, but Fair Work First is a broader set of conditions attached to public money, not a per-contract deliverable in the way a community benefit requirement is.

Social value — the English model, for contrast

"Social value" is the term you'll hear from colleagues working in England, and it's the source of much of the confusion. It pursues similar outcomes by a different mechanism:

• Scotland — community benefits are contractual and delivered. A requirement is written into the contract; the supplier is obliged to deliver it and to evidence delivery.
• England — social value is considered and scored at tender. Under the Public Services (Social Value) Act 2012 (which applies in England and Wales) there is a duty to consider economic, social and environmental wellbeing. PPN 06/20 and the Social Value Model go further for central-government procurement: social value must be explicitly evaluated with a minimum 10% weighting, and is commonly monetised using frameworks such as the National TOM framework.

England's wider procurement regime was reformed by the Procurement Act 2023 (in force 24 February 2025). Scotland has its own devolved procurement regime and is largely outside that Act — which is exactly why importing English "social value" assumptions into a Scottish contract leads people astray.

So how do they all relate?

Put simply: community wealth building and inclusive growth say where we're going; the sustainable procurement duty, the Scottish Model of Procurement and Fair Work First shape how the public sector buys to get there; and community benefit requirements are the specific, contractual deliverables that turn all of that into real jobs, training and local spend. Social value is the parallel English model — useful to understand, but a different instrument.

And that is precisely why delivery is the hard part: the goals are set in statute and strategy, but the value only actually materialises if thousands of individual commitments are tracked, evidenced and reported. That's the subject of the delivering community benefits page.