Procurement is an obscure word for something which is essentially very simple: the purchase of goods and services by local government and other public bodies. Why does it matter to voluntary and community groups? Because the government is increasingly keen to buy services from the voluntary sector, and in a climate where grant funding for your organisation is getting scarcer you might need to look at earning income by delivering public services under contract to their local authority or NHS agency.
Scroll to the foot of this page for news, events and resources that will help you to get to grips with procurement.
Here at One Voice Network we know that many groups feel baffled and antagonised by the procurement process. That’s why we’ve begun a new project to support voluntary and community sector involvement in procurement. The project will have four elements:
- Learning about procurement
- Getting ready for procurement
- Getting connected
- Making sure voluntary and community groups are treated fairly
Learning about procurement
We’ll be developing detailed step-by-step guidance on procurement procedures for funding advisers to use when they are supporting groups. We’ll also be delivering workshops across County Durham on ‘How to win tenders’.
Getting ready for procurement
We’ll provide advisers with guidance on governance documents to ensure that voluntary and community groups are in a legal position to tender to deliver services under contract.
Together with our sister organisation the One Voice Network Voluntary Sector Academy, we will aim to ensure that County Durham’s voluntary and community groups are fully equipped to meet the quality assurance, marketing, financial and monitoring requirements of the tender process.
And our website will continue to develop a host of procurement resources.
Getting connected
To stand a chance of winning contracts you need to be a networker. You need to reach out to your potential customers – the local authorities and health bodies. And you need to be able to form close partnerships with other voluntary and community organisations, so that you can work with them in consortia for large-value contracts. Smaller organisations might want to think about sub-contracting with larger organisations so that they can take on just those aspects of service delivery that they are experts at, without overstretching.
As its name implies, One Voice Network has always been about putting groups in touch with one another and helping them to work together. But now we will be collaborating with funding advice practitioners to find ways of assisting groups in the specific task of coming together to form tendering consortia.
We will also be building on our relationship with the public bodies who will be buying in services from the voluntary and community sector, so that we can promptly and effectively publicise all of the tendering opportunities that materialise. We already have a powerful tool for doing that: our new website can be developed to act as a brokerage zone, a market place where public bodies’ procurement needs can be matched with the voluntary and community groups best placed to meet those needs. You can already register your group with our online Directory of voluntary and community groups – a valuable first step in promoting your presence as a service provider.
Making sure voluntary and community groups are treated fairly
We’ll be working closely with public bodies as they develop their procurement strategies to ensure that voluntary and community groups stand a fair chance when competing with the private sector – and to make sure that public bodies themselves act fairly towards the third sector, with a proper understanding of its unique advantages and some of the special problems it faces.
This will be a natural evolution of our work with the County Durham Compact, a document which sets out the terms for a fair working relationship between the public sector and the voluntary and community sector. The Compact enshrines values such as full cost recovery, funding in advance instead of arrears, prompt information about funding opportunities and the possible withdrawal of funds, and adequate consultation periods when possible policy changes effecting voluntary and community groups are being considered by public bodies.
All of these values need to be restated in terms appropriate to the procurement process. Central government has made a lot of announcements recently about making procurement third-sector friendly and we need to make sure that these do actually inform working practice in County Durham’s local authorities and other public bodies. These announcements include:
- training for commissioners in government departments aimed at helping them to understand the third sector as a potential supplier of services
- reviews of sub-contracting arrangements and consortia formation aimed at finding ways to promote the involvement of smaller voluntary and community groups in service delivery
- template contracts for individual service areas
- promotion of ‘social clauses’ in contracts which would recognise the wider social benefits that accrue from community-participation in service delivery
- a drive to encourage government agencies to offer three-year funding as the norm
- a similar drive to honour the principle of full cost recovery
Here at One Voice, we'll be looking with interest to see whether these worthy initivatives penetrate into the working practice of public bodies in County Durham.