Delivering Social Value That Communities Actually Feel: UKREiiF 2026
At UKREiiF 2026, we brought together industry leaders from development, local government, sustainability, education, and community engagement to ask one honest question: is social value actually reaching the people it’s meant to serve? The result is a report full of candid, thoughtful insight, including perspectives from young people in our own Future Makers programme.
Creating Careers for Young People at Risk of Becoming NEET
We placed Teddy, excluded from mainstream education and at real risk of falling out of education, employment, and training altogether, into a six-month internship at Bellway Barking Riverside. The placement was split deliberately between site and office. On site, he learned skills you can’t get from a classroom: snagging, making good, and the confidence to instruct labourers on what needed doing and when, a marker of trust he hadn’t held before. In the office, he picked up spreadsheets, Word, and research skills for the first time, the kind of grounding that quietly determines whether someone can function in a workplace at all. By the end of the six months, he was a different presence on site. “I hope to get some kind of job in a trade, as I am a lot more confident on a site now than I was a few months ago.” For our team, hosting him was just as rewarding as it was for him. He was engaged, polite, and eager to learn throughout, and the progress in his confidence and independence over six months was steady and visible, exactly the kind of growth that keeps a young person moving toward employment rather than away from it.
Seeing Brentford Through Young People’s Eyes
How can development truly reflect the communities it sits within? At Origin Consult, we believe one answer lies in inviting local people to directly shape how projects are represented and experienced. This summer, we were commissioned by Hadley Property Group to design and deliver a creative engagement programme with young people in Brentford. The brief was simple but powerful: capture how local perspectives could inform the hoarding design for one of Hadley’s upcoming developments. We partnered with eight young people, aged 13–16, and gave each of them a film camera with one guiding question: What does Brentford mean to you? Over the course of a week, they photographed the people, places, and everyday details that make their neighbourhood unique; from green spaces and favourite hangouts to hidden corners and community landmarks. The results were diverse, personal, and reflective of the many ways Brentford is experienced by its youth. We then brought the group together for a creative workshop to share their images, exchange ideas, and reflect collectively. With plenty of pizza to fuel the discussion, the session sparked conversations about what they love most about Brentford, what feels important to represent, and the stories they want others to see. These insights and images have now been shared with the hoarding design team, who will translate them into the visual identity of the site. In this way, the hoardings won’t just act as a boundary, but as a community-rooted narrative-seen and shaped through the eyes of Brentford’s young people. We’re proud to have delivered this project in partnership with Hadley and look forward to seeing the finished hoardings unveiled in the coming months.
Building Something That Lasts: Local School’s Work Experience Week
A week of work experience can go one of two ways: a week spent shadowing adults at desks, or a week that leaves something behind. We wanted the second for the ten students from a local school who spent a week with Bellway Barking Riverside, split deliberately between office and on-site learning. In the first half of the week, students were based in the office, introduced to how a housebuilder actually works. They rotated through the land, design and technical, commercial and sales, and construction teams, took part in a property project judged by a panel of Bellway graduates and apprentices, and went on site to explore the Phase 5 building, seeing a live development up close rather than just hearing about one. The second half moved from planning to making. Working alongside carpenters from PGM Carpentry, the students built three planters from scratch, then handed them over to Thames View Lodge, a local retirement home, where residents still use them today for a weekly gardening club. That shift, from a week spent observing a business to a week that ended with something the students had made in the hands of people who’d use it, is what made the placement land. It gave ten students a sense of what a career in the built environment could look like from the inside, and gave a local community somewhere real to put that experience to use.