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Procurement In Local Government by Andy Morris May 2011
23rd Jun 2011
PROCUREMENT IN LOCAL GOVERNMENT
I am really fearful of what the next few years has in-store for the industry on both sides of local government procurement, client and supplier.
In recent years, we have seen the growth of the “procurement profession” which has been allowed to take control of all procurement activities from pens and pencils to multimillion-pound infrastructure schemes. No doubt some changes were required as there had been a number mistakes on the procurement front and engineers had left themselves open to challenge through not understanding procurement rules and regulations and when they did understand them, ignoring them. However, what has resulted is a de-skilling on the engineering profession and the “procurement professionals” driving procurement without understanding the service or product that is being sought. This often results in inappropriate forms of contract being used or ridiculously convoluted and tortuous processes put in place to procure what should be a straightforward service. In addition, meaningless, unnecessary and costly conditions and requirements are allowed to creep into PQQs and contracts without challenge. For instance, does an organisation really need to provide £5m of motor insurance cover to provide in-house training? Where is the risk assessment to back this requirement up?
This is set to get worse as more and more experienced local government staff leaves their employment through retirement and redundancy. These people are the only ones who could provide the necessary input and take control back. However, they are either not being replaced or replaced by more junior, less experienced staff.
What seems to be happening more and more is that when a client organisation has a service or project that they can’t deliver in-house, for whatever reason, they decide to put it out to tender as the “easier option”. They then spend the minimum amount of time scoping out what is required and specifying the desired outcome. This then gets fed through the corporate procurement sausage machine and what comes out the other end is, quite frankly garbage and unsurprisingly what gets delivered as a result is garbage with supplier and client totally dissatisfied.
When putting something out to tender you often should spend almost as much time on the procurement process (consideration of procurement and contract options and specification of what is required) as doing the work yourself.
The more time and effort that is put in upfront, the greater the likelihood of success. However, you need experienced technical staff to be able to do this.
Andy Morris
Past TAG President
Director of Novo55 Consulting Ltd