Why community benefits matter

What's at stake for communities

Public bodies in Scotland spend billions of pounds a year buying goods, works and services. Community benefits are the mechanism that makes some of that spending do double duty — delivering the contract and leaving something lasting behind in the place where the money is spent.

Concretely, that means:

• Real local jobs — roles created or ring-fenced for people in the area, including those who face barriers to employment.
• Skills and apprenticeships — funded training places and qualifications that outlast the contract and stay with the person.
• Local supply-chain spend — subcontracting opportunities that keep money circulating among regional SMEs rather than leaking out.
• Wider wellbeing — anything additional to the contract that improves the area economically, socially or environmentally.

Framed positively: every large public contract is an opportunity to build local capacity. Community benefits are how that opportunity is captured deliberately, rather than left to chance.

The legal momentum is building

What was once good practice is increasingly a duty. Three pieces of Scottish legislation matter here, and the trajectory is consistently towards more obligation, not less:

• Procurement Reform (Scotland) Act 2014 — establishes community benefit requirements and a duty to consider them for contracts with an estimated value of £4 million or more, alongside the sustainable procurement duty. This is the bedrock.
• Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act 2015 — a related framework strengthening community participation and asset transfer, part of the same direction of travel towards communities having a greater stake.
• Community Wealth Building (Scotland) Act 2026 — passed by the Scottish Parliament on 10 February 2026 and granted Royal Assent on 25 March 2026. It requires local authorities and relevant public bodies to prepare, publish and implement community wealth building action plans, with "have regard" duties on a wider set of bodies.

The accountability shift

The most important change isn't any single clause — it's the shift in what public bodies are expected to do with community benefits. They are moving from something a buyer might mention at tender to something an organisation must:

• Plan — set out, increasingly in published strategies and action plans, how community benefits and community wealth building will be pursued.
• Deliver — actually secure the commitments in live contracts.
• Evidence — collect proof that each commitment was met to a genuine standard, not just claimed.
• Report — account for what was delivered, transparently and on a recurring basis.

That last pair — evidence and report, repeatedly, across everything in flight — is where the duty becomes operationally demanding. A duty you have to demonstrate you've met is a very different thing from one you can simply assert. It's why the practical question quickly becomes not "should we do community benefits?" but "how on earth do we track and prove all of them?" — which is the subject of the next page.