Digital sustainability conversations often default to carbon, energy and infrastructure. But people’s sustainability is just as material – and too often left until late-stage policy, procurement or delivery.
That was a message from the GDSA Summit, which explored what social risk looks like in modern ICT supply chains – from modern slavery and low visibility in offshore tiers, to the UK’s widening digital divide – and what practical steps digital leaders can take to deliver measurable, strategic social value.
Sally Taylor, sustainable procurement specialist at Defra, warned that social issues are often “overshadowed by the environmental and economic areas”, despite being deeply intertwined.
“You can’t deliver value in technology if you’re building it on exploitation of people,” she said, and urged delegates to connect social risk to the decisions they make every day.
The digital divide: who gets left behind as services move online
Christine Liang, head of digital inclusion at DSIT, described the digital divide as “really, really complicated”, driven by affordability (devices and connectivity), skills, confidence and motivation – particularly among older people who have lived offline for most of their lives.
“We know that about 1.6 million people in the UK just completely live offline,” she said.
The consequences are all too often financial and practical, she added. “People who live offline generally seem to pay almost three times as much for certain services because you can’t… do things like price comparisons.”
Liang’s team has been exploring how circularity can unlock social value at scale, including a cross-government pilot to refurbish and securely wipe end-of-life laptops, then donate them through charity partners to digitally excluded people.
Social risk grows as visibility drops
Shelley Cotterill, head of social value UKI at DXC Technology, set out a familiar pattern in ICT supply chains: Tier 1 may look well-controlled “on paper”, but risk increases sharply further down.
“The further down that you go, the less visibility you have… and that’s where the issues around labour practices, modern slavery and subcontracting actually quietly creep in,” she said.
Cotterill also flagged an emerging social risk linked to AI and automation: the hidden workforce behind AI systems – data labellers, content reviewers and task workers – who may not be protected by the labour standards UK buyers expect. The focus, she said, should evolve from assurance-by-assertion to verifiable evidence.
“We need to shift it from relying on suppliers to tell us… and actually create pathways for us to actually see it,” she said.
She pointed to shared audit frameworks, cross-government transparency tools and consistent expectations across departments, using government’s market influence to set the baseline.
Craig Melson, associate director, climate, environment and sustainability at techUK, said that modern slavery remains the “number one social risk” raised by OEMs and their UK partners, particularly through mineral extraction and upstream supply chains. He was blunt about the limits of end-to-end visibility.
“Complete supply chain visibility is a fantasy,” he told attendees.
Instead, he argued for targeted action where leverage is real – including shared intelligence and audits, and government helping connect buyers to credible NGOs, trade unions and labour voice organisations in sourcing regions, “where the most harm is taking place.”
He also warned that the waste sector itself is a major modern slavery risk area – another reason circular approaches matter.
Moving from transactional social value to outcomes
A key theme was that social value cannot be delivered as a bolt-on. Rebecca Griffiths, net zero and sustainability lead at NHS England, described work with West Yorkshire Integrated Care Board where commissioners and suppliers built confidence and clarity together, moving beyond procurement paperwork.
“Good social value doesn’t start and end with procurement… social value is not transactional,” she said.
In practice, this meant translating a supplier’s long list of social value offers into a small set of outcome-focused measures. “We were able to… drive those 20 different suggestions down into six really tangible KPIs,” she explained.
Those KPIs covered net zero and climate commitments, but also wider socio-economic outcomes like local skills and addressing labour gaps – aligned to how services would shift from face-to-face care to digital delivery.
Cotterill offered a delivery-side example: embedding social value directly into the operating model by partnering with a UK social enterprise to provide first-line IT support – creating entry routes into tech careers for people who would not otherwise access t
“We didn’t just place people. We created mentoring, learning pathways and opportunities for them to move into cloud roles permanently,” she said.
Her advice is to “get social value into the conversation from day one. If it comes in late, it becomes a checkbox exercise.”
A call for a unified approach
In closing, the speakers all pushed for more coordinated, scalable approaches – and for suppliers to show, not just tell.
Liang urged organisations to join and replicate device reuse schemes. “Come and join the movement… [it’s] a great way to demonstrate your sustainability credentials, but also to genuinely change someone’s life.”
For her part, Cotterill called for a more unified approach across the UK. “Imagine if we actually were able to come together and do things together for a unified purpose.”
Her proposal is a UK-wide digital capability partnership and a social impact charter for digital supply chains, setting shared standards for labour, subcontracting, inclusion and community outcomes – “not about competing on social value, it’s about raising the floor.”
From the NHS perspective, Griffiths called for a “golden thread” through planning, commissioning and procurement so social value supports the health inequalities agenda rather than being added at the end.
Taylor closed with a call to leadership and intent: “The small action today can be the big change of tomorrow.”
