What is council procurement and commissioning?
We often use the terms procurement and commissioning in local government.
Commissioning involves identifying needs in the areas we serve as a council, agreeing the outcomes we want, and defining the service, works or goods we will need to achieve those outcomes. This includes defining how the service should be delivered, and who will deliver it.
Procurement describes the process of getting those services, works or goods that we want from a third party, which could be a business, a public organisation or a charity. These processes are at the centre of how we spend public money, to deliver the best public services that we can.
Our Procurement and Commissioning Strategy exists to ensure that we run our procurement and commissioning processes fairly, transparently, and in line with our values and policies as a council. This consultation invites you to read and comment on our updated draft Strategy, which incorporates recent policy amendments, and takes account of recent events, such as Brexit and the coronavirus pandemic.
The wider council policy
As a council, we have declared Climate and Ecological Emergencies, and responding to these urgent needs is informing our policy, and how we run all of our teams and services.
We have developed this Procurement and Commissioning Strategy to ensure that procurement activity takes into account the Climate Emergency and local sustainability issues. We will take the following issues into account:
- Supporting small and medium-sized businesses
- Working with local organisations and suppliers when we can
- Achieving Social Value
- Explicitly rejecting organisations or business practices which may be involved in Modern Slavery
The policy context for this Strategy
We are developing this Strategy at a time when the UK procurement rules are changing, following the UK withdrawal from the EU. EU procurement rules previously drove public sector procurement in the UK. New government principles for procurement will come into effect in early 2022, and this Strategy update gives us the opportunity to align our prectices with the new requirements. Our Strategy also reflects how central government is changing its procurement.