The above is just a handful of a frankly frightening list of policies, strategies and systems which people who procure things in local government have to know about. Imagine you are employed in a small local authority and you sometimes have to arrange new contracts. Where would you start?
Well, you could get on the phone to the experts. In an office in Farringdon, London, there is a group of 13 people, drawn from the public and private sectors, who can answer all the questions you might have. They are the procurement team at the Improvement and Development agency (IDeA), a body set up in 1999 to seek out and then spread good practice in local government.
The hotline is free. Usually one of the experts there will be able to answer the question or if it is a specialist enquiry – for example on PPP – they can direct you to the right government organisation. Most of the questions, says Lee Digings, procurement assistant director, relate to government policy.
The advisory service is one part of the procurement team's work. And if you want to keep up with what the latest thinking on procurement in local government is, it might be wise to keep an eye on IDeA's programmes. At the moment there are four:
1. Best practice
Partnering means bringing all the groups involved in a project together at day one to agree common goals. Partnering means working with the same contractor on a series of projects over a number of years. Partnering means getting the supply chain involved early in the design to produce savings which can be shared.
Partnering means all things to all men. But not for long. Because in October the government is going to publish its National Strategy for Procurement. Part of this document's job will be to explain exactly what is meant by partnering and collaboration.
Produced jointly by the Local Government Association and the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, the strategy will also tell local authorities what the government expects of them by when and where they can go for help. To coincide with this, IDeA's procurement group has commissioned a series of guides from KPMG across a range of procurement issues. Each contains information on generic good practice, followed by chapters on how you apply it in different areas. The Local Government Task Force (see page 19) has helped on the construction-related chapters.
Drafts of the guides will be up on IDeA's website soon (www.idea.gov.uk) with final versions due out in October.
2. Peer review
It couldn't happen in the private sector. The CEO of one contractor, realising he isn't doing as well as his peers, invites the CEO of a successful company to spend a week going through all his business with a fine tooth comb to find out what's going wrong.
In the public sector, however, this technique is the key to improvement, according to IDeA. "The power of the review is that it's led by peers," says Digings. "It's designed to speed up sharing of best practice."
IDeA can organise Peer Reviews on an authority-wide basis or on smaller areas. Diging's crew, of course, concentrates on procurement which covers "paperclips to PFI". So far they have carried out 20 'fitness checks', many of them with district councils who, by definition, have far fewer resources than their bigger cousins.
The issue which has come out of many of these reviews is that senior management doesn't see procurement strategically, they see it as a technical function. "Unsurprisingly we find that the depth of understanding of the Rethinking Construction agenda among senior managers and politicians is less than everybody would like," says Digings. However there is good news on the construction front. "We are regularly surprised and delighted by examples of really innovative partnering projects. But they tend to be happening in isolation."
The goal is to infect the whole of the authority with that isolated good practice. And that means sorting out the managers.
3. Skills training
The list which started off this article was part of a long skills framework which Digings has drawn up to try and work out what training local government procurement people need to do their jobs (you can see the full document at www.idea.gov.uk/procurement/?id=consultation). At the moment he is getting input from local government people to refine the framework. The next step will be to sort out some training.
Digings wants an affordable national programme so that local authorities can work out which skills they are lacking and then get them. It's early days, though, on this project and the government would have to provide funds to make it a goer.
4. Regional networks
Today a contractor could have a three-year maintenance contract with one council. Tomorrow it could be asked to tender for a package three times as big, as neighbouring authorities get together to create buying power.
IDeA's fourth procurement programme is to set up 'Centres of Excellence' to examine opportunities for collaboration among local authorities and other public sector bodies. Joint procurement is one model being considered, as well as sharing resources.
Essex is an example of a regional network where the county council and five district councils are jointly using IDeA's specialist e-procurement software, Marketplace. Since the councils started using the system in January, savings have started to surface as suppliers have been able to offer more competitive prices to supply across the six organisations.
Source
Construction Manager
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