Commissioning and Procurement
The regional and national policy context around planning and delivering public services has moved quite markedly towards engagement with the voluntary and community sector (VCS). Commissioning is the cycle of assessing the needs of people in an area, designing and then securing an appropriate service. Procurement is the specific aspects of the commissioning cycle that focus on the process of buying services, from initial advertising through to appropriate contract arrangements.
VCS organisations are increasingly considering tendering for the delivery of public services as a way of funding the services that they provide to clients. Whether the funding for local services comes via grants or competitively tendered contracts, VONNE advocates that the VCS have a vital role to play in helping to design services that meet the needs of local people, and are well placed to deliver many of these.
VONNE carried out a preliminary mapping and gapping exercise of the support that is currently being offered to the sector in early 2008.
Procurement Support to the VCS in the North East (Word 132kB)
VONNE considers that there are three categories of support needs. Firstly, it is essential that individual VCS organisations that wish to engage in the provision of public services are contract ready; secondly, where there is a general trend towards higher value contracts covering wider geographical areas, ensuring that VCS organisations have the means to collaborate to compete jointly for work, and thirdly, ensuring that commissioners and procurers in the public sector understand the value of the VCS as strategic partner, a delivery partner and as an independent champion of change.
The North East Commissioning Action Plan
During 2007 the North East Centre of Excellence (NECE), with support from the Northern Rock Foundation, worked with a range of Third Sector organisations and public sector organisations to understand and respond to the procurement and commissioning agenda. It is important to note that the emphasis of this work was not only on the Third Sector's involvement in procurement but also as a strategic partner in needs analysis and commissioning.
Building on this work VONNE, in partnership with Northern Rock Foundation, NESEP, NECE and the Government Office for the North East have developed a Framework and Action Plan that responds to the challenges and barriers that were highlighted in the series of NECE roundtable discussions that were held during 2007. The process was driven by the broader needs of service users and consequently the Framework and Action Plan are based on an examination of the needs of all parties engaged in this type of work.
The Framework document was launched at the end of 2007 and can be found at the link below:
The subsequent Action Plan building on the recommendations of the Framework can be downloaded below:
