Rethinking Value for Money in Public Service Delivery

Ask ten people in the public sector what “value for money” means and you’ll get ten different answers - each valid, but often incomplete. For some, it’s about cost savings. For others, impact. For others still, it’s about showing that decisions were fair, transparent and justified.

In practice, value for money isn’t a number or a slogan. It’s a way of thinking about how resources - money, time, people, data, partnerships - are turned into outcomes that matter. And that way of thinking has to live within teams, not just in business cases or budget lines.

The missing middle of value creation

Most organisations have strong controls at the top and robust processes at the bottom. Finance teams model costs, delivery teams hit milestones. But the middle - the space where choices are made, priorities are set and trade-offs are weighed - is often less clear.

That’s where real value is created or lost. It’s the conversation between a project lead and a service manager about whether a task needs to be done at all. It’s the moment a digital team decides whether to buy a tool or build it in-house. It’s how a leadership team judges success - not just on delivery but on impact, equity and sustainability.

When teams are confident in this middle ground, they make better decisions, they ask better questions and they understand how a small change in a workflow, a meeting structure or a supplier brief can shift cost, risk and impact at the same time.

The compliance trap

For many, value for money has come to mean compliance. It’s a phrase that appears in every tender and contract evaluation but is too often reduced to price comparison. It’s no secret that many bids are decided largely on cost, assuming that as long as all other compliance requirements are met, the cheapest option represents best value.

But that logic often fails in practice. If the lowest-priced product or service turns out to need additional work, redesign, support or correction, the true cost quickly rises, not only in money but in time, confidence and public trust. That’s not value for money.

True VfM weighs the whole picture: quality, reliability, social and environmental impact, and the long-term cost of ownership or maintenance. It’s about effectiveness as much as economy.

From compliance to confidence

The language of value for money has been trapped for too long in the audit mindset, demonstrating prudence after the fact rather than building confidence before and during delivery. When teams can translate frameworks like HM Treasury’s Green Book into plain, practical routines, defining SMART success factors, linking them to real outcomes and revisiting them regularly, they start to make value an active discipline rather than a retrospective justification.

Seeing value in all its forms

Financial value will always matter, but it rarely stands alone. Every good decision has social, operational and environmental dimensions too. A procurement team deciding on a contract renewal is balancing efficiency with inclusion. A local authority deciding how to allocate limited staff time is weighing immediate impact against long-term resilience.

Understanding those dimensions helps teams connect the dots between cost and quality, between people and performance, between short-term savings and long-term outcomes. Surely, it’s about joining up the system of value creation rather than narrowing it to a ledger.

Making it routine

For value for money to stick, it has to be routine. It’s not a rulebook or a checklist, it’s a way of thinking that threads through how a team plans, delivers and learns. When that mindset becomes part of everyday conversations, decisions start to look different: meetings focus on purpose as well as progress, success measures are framed around outcomes rather than outputs, and trade-offs are surfaced and discussed rather than assumed.

The aim isn’t to create another reporting process, but to build shared judgement, a common way of weighing options, spotting waste and recognising value as it’s created. Over time, that collective habit does more for transparency and accountability than any template or form ever could.

How Teamshaper helps

This thinking underpins our Value for Money and Commercial Acumen for Public Sector Teams programme, a practical one-day workshop designed to help teams make these principles tangible. It takes the logic of the Green Book and turns it into habits, tools and conversations that strengthen financial confidence, improve decision-making and make value visible.

It’s suited to delivery, operations, policy and corporate teams who want to use commercial awareness not as a compliance measure but as a shared language of impact.

When teams think commercially and act collectively, value for money stops being a requirement and starts becoming a capability.