Agenda item

The Committee considered the contract procedure rules, waivers and breaches update. Mr Mark Preston, Assistant Director, Finance attended to present the report. This report provided a quarterly summary in relation to compliance with the Council’s Contract Procedure Rules (CPR’s), compliance with the Public Contracts Regulations 2015 and summarised the waivers and breaches.

The number of contract waivers granted in the last quarter to March 2023. Were detailed within the report along with details of what the high waivers were in respect of. No breaches had been reported to the Statutory Officers in the period since the last report.

In respect of procurement and contract management training, an additional 83 training sessions had been attended in Q4 2022/23 bringing the 2022/23 total so far to 341 and a cumulative total since 1st April 2020 to 1,479. The team had also developed and launched a new ‘Tender Process’ module in March which encompassed an overview of the regulations and things to consider; the tender documents; tendering timeline; step-by-step review of the Open Procedure.

In May 2022 the Procurement Bill was published in Parliament. The proposed date for the Bill to clear the legislative process was Spring 2024. Procurement had established a project in readiness that would be rolled out once the Bill was finalised and updates on progress and deliverables would be provided.

During discussion, points raised included:

·   The Procurement team was regularly attending monthly directorate budget board meetings and presenting figures around work being undertaken and contracts which were coming up. This had been working well in practice and provided Service Directors and Corporate Directors  with a clear picture of forthcoming contracts.

·   In relation to training, the team was working on regularly reporting training statistics for future reports to the Committee. Within the 2022/23 financial year, 53 contract managers who were on the contract management application out of 136 had attended at least one training session during the year. Others may well be experienced officers who had attended in previous years. Statistics would continue to be developed and training information put in an improved context for Members on a regular basis.

·   The Committee was pleased to note that there had been no breaches to report within this period and paid thanks to the team. A suggestion was made that in the future where there were not any breaches, a nil report be submitted within the confidential part of the agenda.

·   Members suggested that it would be useful to provide categorisation of waivers to identify in number terms, reasons why directorates may be applying for a higher number of waivers, even where they had been advised in good time of contract renewals.

·   A Member raised concern that most high value waivers came from critical services such as Adult Social Care, Children’s Services and Housing and noted that a trend analysis would be helpful to understand the reasons for this and whether this related to a lack of competition in the market. The Committee was advised that the team was liaising with other local authorities to find a workable solution on enhancing the marketplace in these sorts of circumstances and the need to be aware of the local and wider market was recognised.

RESOLVED:

That the report and the work of the strategic procurement team be noted.

Note 1: Councillor N Hussain left the meeting at 12.06 p.m.