In its Green Paper on Transforming Public Procurement, the Government set out the development of major legislative reforms for public procurement. These will deliver a new regulatory regime post Brexit that better meets the needs of the UK. All contracting authorities need to prepare now to ensure they have the right procurement capability and capacity so they can benefit from these changes.
The accompanying Procurement Policy Note (PPN) outlined the Government’s intention for contracting authorities to benchmark themselves over the next few years, and the LGA has negotiated to have our sector’s National Procurement Strategy recognised as a core set of values and launched its own benchmarking exercise this week.
The LGA have developed a diagnostic to enable Councils to gauge their current level of attainment against the value codes set out in the National Strategy. Completing the diagnostic will allow you to ascertain where improvement is needed in accordance with your local priorities and help you gain positive engagement with the National Procurement Strategy from leaders, elected members, chief officers and other professional stakeholder groups For those of you who submitted responses in 2018, which most of you in the region did, it’s a change to measure your progress against your previous submission. For those of you who submitted responses in 2018, which most of you in the region did, it’s a change to measure your progress against your previous submission.
EELGA’s Talent Bank Procurement Associates – Ken Cole and Rowena Ward were directly involved in building the 2018 Diagnostic and are supporting the Local Government Association (LGA) again in this current exercise. The diagnostic will also help the LGA gauge the impact of their work over the last three years and allow councils to identify what is needed for the next iteration of the National Procurement Strategy, which is intended to be published in 2022.
The diagnostic was launched last week and there has been excellent early engagement with councils throughout the country – the East of England had the highest regional response rates in 2018, and we would love for this to be the case again this year. ‘The diagnostic offers the opportunity to compare and collaborate as a region. Also, please remember the NPS is an enabling framework for you to carry out your own local benchmark against your council’s own priorities, not a top down compliance exercise.’ said Ken Cole.
The deadline for submissions is 1st October 2021, and we would like to thank you all in advance for your time and participation in this. If you have not received correspondence from the LGA or have any queries, please email Guy.head@local.gov.uk