North West Improvement and Efficiency Partnership

 

 

The procurement programme will encourage significant savings achieved through collaborative procurement, both at a regional and sub-regional level. It will accomplish this by a fully mature management of local government third party spend, with each local authority having a strategic understanding of its relations with key supply markets and a co-operative approach to managing those markets where this is in the public interest.

 

The subject of sustainable procurement will also be addressed, including increased understanding of the impact of procurement decisions on local economies and increased engagement with the voluntary and community sector in the provision of services.

 

The programme will ensure that all NW authorities also meet the requirements as defined in the National Procurement Strategy.

 

The programme will also look to further collaboration with other public sector partners such as the regional police forces and North West Development Agency.

 

Specific work streams will include:

 

eProcurement 

The promotion of good practice and the use of new technologies including: 

The programme will alerting the sub-regional hubs and individual authorities to existing “good” framework agreements, set up by OGC and others. Where required, it will also look at mini-competitions with aggregated demand to drive out further efficiencies.

 

Regional Procurement Support 

The programme will negotiate relevant contracts and framework agreements on behalf of the region, where the sub-regions feel a regional approach would be beneficial. Other strategic procurement projects on behalf of the all north west local authorities will also be managed to support the sub-regional procurement programmes, such as the Standards project and improving skills within procurement professionals.

 

Sustainable Procurement 

The programme will collate national and regional thinking on sustainable procurement and support all north west local authorities in the implementation of the sustainable procurement task forces flexible framework. It will continue to work with the North West Sustainable Procurement Forum with NWDA, NW NHS, Environment Agency, GONW and other key stakeholders.

 

The programme will be managed and delivered by a small core team of procurement and programme management specialists. The final makeup and governance of this team will be defined by the procurement board. 

 

There are four strands to the procurement key business priority. The objective is a  strategy for long-term effective and efficient management of third party expenditure by North West local authorities to deliver efficiencies/savings of 12.5% pa in 5 years.

 

 

The Procurement programme board has the following projects: