Getting it together: the councils that collab­­orate in buying services

Collaboration and transparency have increasingly been part of the central government agenda. The Office of Government Commerce has collaborative procurement teams helping public agencies with buying anything from food to energy. It also coordinates frameworks across the UK's nine regions which, by pre-auditioning suppliers, help drive down prices and ensure contracts are good value for money. One example of collaboration is the construction framework of Improvement and Efficiency South East, which in the last few years has carried out £2bn worth of building projects. It has saved its 74 participating authorities around £78m, against set-up costs of just £3m, says Hampshire county council's chief executive, Andrew Smith. On top of that, it has improved customer satisfaction and (thus far) eliminated contractual disputes. Some of this is down to simple economics. Councils bring their building works together to get a better deal: for example a 15% discount for building 10 schools instead of one, or a better price on a £10m police station bundled with a much larger regeneration deal. Another advantage is repetition – not having to spend £50,000 jumping through European procurement hoops for each building deal because the framework has already done that. It's also about sharing expertise. Smaller councils effectively contract out complex procurements to their larger, more capable neighbours. Not everyone likes the idea of collaboration. Hampshire came up against "a potential loss of sovereignty ... you have got to give up some sovereignty to allow collaboration to work," Smith says. Councils often distrust others' ideas. "Sometimes 'not invented here' was an issue." Nor is collaboration a panacea: it can't overcome basic weaknesses in individual councils, nor stop them bringing forward badly designed projects. If collaboration makes public bodies nervous, it's nothing compared to the terrors of transparency – but some insist this, too, can help save money. Windsor and Maidenhead council has just begun using Spotlight on Spend, a website where residents can see exactly how much the council spends on pretty much anything it buys, from lift repairs to water coolers to staff uniforms. Liam Maxwell, a Conservative councillor, says most council officers "are responsible and are not there to waste any government money at all. Just by making it explicit that we will share [information, officers] then have a much more careful view about what they are doing." On a similar tack, publishing the energy used in civic buildings cut energy use by 25% "overnight", he says. A culture of scrutiny also helped the council identify wasteful spending and cut costs. Its 4% council tax cut this year "is not [just] because we published the data, but it certainly helped," he says. The council has published information normally hidden by the veil of commercial confidentiality – and has thus driven prices down. For instance, he says: "You get some old battle-hardened waste specialists telling us we can't publish how much they are getting per tonne. But people are going to have to accept that." Other authorities – notably Bradford city council – have raised fears over the time and cost it will take to publish all their information. Maxwell denies this is so: once the website is up and running, it takes no time to add the data to it. And, he claims, publishing contract information will create competition as local and central government try to better each other's prices: "That's where the competitive edge with officers will take over." Online transparency Combining this drive for transparency with collaborative procurement is the West Midlands procurement hub. Jonathan Jones, its programme manager, says the hub is a very simple idea: a website that allows councils to see what contracts other councils have signed. It works in two ways: councils can see whether other authorities have existing contracts they could use, avoiding the need for repeat procurements; or they can see who else is planning a similar contract, and join forces. The hub, which started in May 2007, costs little more than the salary of one fulltime staff member, but has already saved an estimated £34m across its 33 authorities and 350 contracts. Jones says this could "potentially be four or five times as much" if the hub expands as planned. He admits that he, too, encountered scepticism. But authorities have come round, he says – especially after seeing savings such as a 25% cut in the cost of school-to-home taxi services for special needs children. One worry is that the new government's suspicion of regional bodies could jeopardise such savings. "You do need to have someone with the regional overview of what's going on," says Jones. "Someone has to sit above and see what everyone is doing." Return to the home page for more on public services