The Council’s addressable spend on goods, services, and works is around £380M annually. A variety of routes to market are used such as quotes, tenders and call-offs from frameworks. We are contracted by way of simple purchase orders to long term partnership agreements depending on the value and complexity of the goods, services or works.
To achieve this a small but effective, centralised procurement function supports Directorates to be compliant with both our internal Contract Procedure Rules (CPRs), national policy and procurement legislation.
This policy builds on achievements embedded by the team in the last 18 months since the formation of the Council, which have included:
- establishing a small, central procurement team who have embedded a culture of business partnership working within directorates
- developing a suite of documents/templates to support colleagues to procure in compliance with the CPRs and national legislation (where relevant)
- driving the inclusion of scored Social Value questions in tendering activity and making outcomes/delivery from this a contractual commitment, with a subsequent, robust tracking process
- establishing our own framework agreements that encourage participation by local suppliers and/or SME/VCSE organisations to meet the business needs of the Council
- going live with webpages to support, train, develop and encourage suppliers to work with the Council