Planning pre-procurement
Many measures in the Procurement Act 2023 encourage effective planning before starting your procurement. This includes creating a procurement pipeline, being transparent about choosing your options, and engaging early with the market. The National Procurement Policy Statement (NPPS) contains some key priorities, including driving economic growth, which means investing time in developing the market at a grassroots level when you want to foster local enterprise.
Good pre-planning is essential for councils and can save time and resources, and your early planning will help you later down the line at contract award stage when there is the strongest time pressure to get the contract in place and delivering results.
Here are some key pointers:
The strategic links:
Ultimately, your contract should support the delivery of the council's core objectives outlined in the corporate or council plan. These objectives will flow into directorate and service plans, and wouldn't it be great if those plans listed the procurements needed for the forthcoming year to support publication of pipeline notices where required.
Know the needs:
Whilst the council's corporate plan would have been based on consultation and feedback from residents, the specific needs to be met through a contract may need some engagement with the end user e.g. what standards would residents want from a housing repair contract or how could an IT system best interface with the user?
Tip: in some cases, it’s the law to involve end users in the decision to appoint a supplier, ref the Care Act 2014 and Families Act 2014
Support the market:
If you have a strong market you will have a wider range of quality choices when selecting your supplier. This can include breaking down the barriers for SMEs and the voluntary sector to have the skills, confidence and knowledge to make a bid.
Some early engagement with the market can also inform your options for procuring the service.
Clear on what you want to achieve:
Once you have expectations from users and useful information from suppliers, you can start shaping what you want to achieve and what is achievable. It is a requirement of the Act that certain contracts include KPIs (key performance indicators) and setting them early makes it clear what you want to achieve – at the same time set the social value indicators... again relating them back to the core objectives of the council.
Have KPIs and social value indicators that you can measure through the life of the contract to demonstrate success
Review your options:
We have presumed that the service will be delivered through a contract, but your options should also include in-sourcing where the council delivers the services directly with its own resources - consider it along with the different sourcing routes such as open or competitive tendering procedures, frameworks or dynamic markets.
Create your pipeline:
The Act requires contracting authorities to publish an annual procurement pipeline notice if they intend to spend more than £100m on goods, services, or works contracts (other than special ‘exempted’ ones) during the following year. Whilst this notice only has to give information on contracts of £2m+, many councils are producing (and will likely publish) a complete pipeline. This helps the market know the range of opportunities and support the council plan its resources.
Tip: consider delegated authority to agree changes up to a certain level and remember to include the whole life span of the contract covering potential extensions and renewals
Have your governance in place:
Governance is important to councils in ensuring the right decisions are made at the right time, by the right people. A streamlined way of doing that is to take your annual pipeline to a Cabinet meeting so the decisions to start procurements are taken at one time - you might need to provide more detail on the higher value contracts and can include delegated authority to award the contract. This means you won't need to return to Cabinet, which can take some time, unless there has been a change to what was originally agreed...or for those procurements that were not known at the time the pipeline was created.
Reporting: To support trust and confidence in your procurement and contract management process, reporting is important. This can be through a dashboard of your contract management health, filtered and used for different audiences.
This dashboard can point out where support might be needed to ensure the contract is back on track, understand if there are recurring problems, and, of course, celebrate success!
