RIEPS will be missed
It is official – the UK’s nine Regional Improvement and Efficiency Partnerships will cease to exist, at least in their current form, after 31 March 2011, as central government funding comes to an end. Some of these organisations – which have supported councils with best practice on efficiency and procurement – plan to continue, but not in their current shape or scale. This, we’re told, is necessary to save money as a part of the deficit reduction programme. Some add it’s part of the government’s localism policy – encouraging decision making at a local level.This sounds plausible, and is reminiscent of the creating of Executive Agencies in central government the early 1990s. This was going to empower people to make changes and remove the hand of “Whitehall” from decision making. Now it is about centralisation.
Whatever one’s personal view of RIEPs, they do perform at least one essential role. They act as a catalyst for change. If the public sector is going to get anywhere near the levels of cashable savings it needs from its procurement expenditure (up to 25 per cent reduction), collaborative working is crucial. By this I don’t mean putting yet another framework contract in place for everyone to ignore, but introducing commercially proven techniques, including supplier relationship development, large-scale e-auctions, shared multi-agency contracts, standardisation and cross-sector category management teams. All good stuff and, of course, supported by Green, Gershon, Jay, Rayner and others who have all made the same recommendations to UK prime ministers dating back to Thatcher in 1979.
It is not that collaborative working does not work, it’s simply missing key ingredients. First, have the catalyst in place to identify and start the collaborative opportunity, and second, the ownership of top managers prepared to commit their organisations to taking part in suitable programmes, even if it means overruling their own staff or upsetting a current supplier or outsourcer.
In local government it is the RIEPs, or something similar, that are the only impartial organisations capable of acting as a catalyst to get the multi-agency collaborative exercises off the ground. The overlap of common suppliers, contracts and the levels of commodity purchases in all regions are major opportunities for making large-scale cashable savings.
The RIEPs have built good decision-making networks of senior managers that can act as the delivery agents. They are essential to remove the barriers and objections always there to oppose collaboration, whether it be the requirement is different or, even worse, why contract standing orders don’t permit collaborative working/shared contracting.
There is a maxim in the public sector: ‘When something starts to work, close it down or reorganise it’. This is about to happen again, to the RIEPs. Who will alert ministers to the opportunity that it is about to be thrown away?
* Ken Cole SPS Consultancy Services, and procurement adviser to Capital Ambition
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Ken has hit a fair point with his comment about “catalyst for change”. In the North East of England, NEIEP has done a great job in galvanising the 12 local authorities into working together to introduce, via NEPO, a basket of changes that will be welcomed by the SME supplier. This includes the longed-for single PQQ and great moves to make LA contracts more accessible to the SME. The problem is it is all happening as I write – just a shame NEIEP will not have time to truly embed their legacy -which brings me to endorsing Ken’s last comment!
It is very true that the RIEPs built on the good work of the Regional Centres of Excellence and have done an excellent job of raising the profile of procurement within local government. The progress has been amazing in the North West with the creation of sub-regional procurement hubs and regional procurement initiatives. The regional and sub-regional projects have delivered real efficiency savings to authorities and there is a risk of this collaboration disappearing, or reducing, without some regional co-ordination.
There is an argument that if authorities see the value in such work they should be willing to fund this themselves but those of us who work in this sector know that is always not so simple. It is true though that sometimes it only requires a very small amount of seed funding to make something happen – just a bit of resource to set up the meetings, sort out a room, chase actions and a bit of funding for a willing authority to widen its tendering scope to include others.
The irony is as Malcolm points out that this “catalyst for change” role could disappear just at the time authorities need it most.
Read more about NWIEP Efficiency and Procurement Work at http://efficiency.nwiep.org.uk.