Social Value
The Southern Renewals Enterprise has established a resilient, collaborative model that has already seen over £344m worth of social value generated in the local area. With strong foundations and proven initiatives now in place, the Enterprise is poised to continue scaling its impact over the next 8 years and to leave a lasting legacy in place for future communities.
The Southern Region is the busiest and most complex railway network in Britain: three routes (Wessex, Sussex, Kent), approximately 3,300 miles of track and 544 stations handling over 700 million journeys a year. Historically, short contracting cycles and fragmented delivery limited opportunities to build enduring community partnerships, local supply chains and skills pipelines.
Established in April 2024, Southern Renewals Enterprise (SRE) is a collaborative delivery model responsible for the delivery of Network Rail’s £9 billion renewals portfolio across the Southern Region. It brings together Network Rail (as Capable Owner) with four key delivery partners: VolkerFitzpatrick (Buildings and Civils), VolkerRail (Track), Octavius Infrastructure (Electrification and Plant), and AtkinsRéalis (Signalling) and Network Rail’s Works Delivery team. Together, these organisations operate as a single Enterprise, sharing objectives, risks, and rewards to deliver renewals across the Southern Region.
From its inception, SRE embedded social value into its governance, commercial incentives, and delivery strategy, with one of the SRE’s five core outcomes – Leaving a Positive Legacy – directly targeting social sustainability. This means prioritising and delivering social value is not just aspirational, it is contractual. If targets are not met, partners forgo profit, ensuring accountability and alignment across the Enterprise.
We are doing things differently on SRE, working to the ICE’s Project 13 model to embed collaborative working across our delivery partners, supply chains and supporting organisations.
As a result, the Enterprise has delivered social value worth £344,754,048.40 to date, with a strategy and a system in place to continue to deliver extraordinary social value in the future.
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