Agenda item

The Strategic Director for Commercial and Change introduced the Report explaining that the Council’s Commercial Team was responsible for ensuring whole life value for money from the Council’s and Worcestershire Children’s First spend with third parties, which was approximately £632m during the 2020/21 financial year. The Team tendered and managed contracts ranging from a few hundred pounds, up to hundreds of millions of pounds over the life of the agreement.

During the past 18 months, the Team’s focus had been shared across corporate procurement activity, restructure, and in delivering COVID-19 response initiatives. In respect of the Covid-19 response, significant resources and effort has been

committed to ensure timely and effective achievement of the response requirements, including the set-up of the community test hubs, sourcing and distributing over 2.5 million items of personal protective equipment (PPE), negotiated leases for the Council’s test and vaccine centres, as well as working with local manufacturers and hotels to secure the capacity required.

The Corporate Procurement Strategy 2022-2025 was in the process of being re-written to reflect the changing social, economic and legislative landscape in which the Council now found itself. Greater focus would be placed on driving social value and promoting local economic growth as part of the Council’s support for the COVID recovery initiatives. An outcomes framework had been developed that reflected both national and local priorities, and the Team would continue to challenge themselves at all stages of the procurement process to ensure these outcomes had been considered and facilitated in so far as was reasonably practicable and effective.

The Cabinet Member with Responsibility (CMR) for Corporate Services and Communication highlighted the challenges around recruitment, retention and succession planning, emphasising the importance of apprentices in this process.  Effective procurement was vital for the Council and the CMR was pleased with the success to date in reducing costs and achieving better value, but acknowledged that there was still work to do in very challenging times.  The CMR was keen that the Procurement Strategy made it easy for local businesses including micro companies to get involved with providing services in Worcestershire.

The Chairman invited questions and the following points were raised

·       A Member queried the communications activity to attract suppliers to Worcestershire County Council, the Head of Commercial advised that suppliers needed to register through In-Tend (the Council’s E-tendering portal) which would also send alerts to suppliers.  The Director suggested that consideration should be given to setting up an award scheme for local providers.

·       In response to a query about whether the Council’s Procurement Strategy was agile enough to meet the demands of the future.  The Director explained that government legislation was changing which, would require Councils to operate in a different way and have an emphasis on achieving social value wherever possible. 

·       It was questioned whether the skills set for Council staff should be akin to those of private sector staff, the CMR advised that if employees were developed through the Council under the apprenticeship scheme, they would have the correct skills set.

·       In response to a Member query about the EU procurement rules and Request for proposal (RFP) scoring for contractors. The Head of Commercial advised that local suppliers were targeted but, there was a challenge around the definition of a local supplier.

·       A Member asked at what level of Social Value (currently 5%) became detrimental. The Head of Commercial advised that each tender would need to be considered on an individual basis to assess this.

·       In response to a question about whether Council specifications routinely included questions about the carbon footprint, the Head of Commercial advised that this was not routinely included but elements of the Council spend did take this into account eg all of its energy purchase was green energy.  The point was made that this should underpin all of Council’s procurement.