Sourcing Playbook: learning through doing in local government – webinar summary

We were delighted to be joined by Olivia Labonté from MHCLG the programme sponsor, alongside Victoria Bayley, Head of Whole Life Commissioning at Wiltshire Council and Katie McAuley-White, Project Officer at Warwick District Council to speak about their experiences of putting the sourcing playbook into practice through the “Hands-On Sourcing Support” programme.

Olivia opened by reflecting on the goals of the programme – to bring a resource designed for central government, but full of best practice that applied across the public sector, to life for local government. The programme also provided feedback into the teams responsible for the playbooks to help them to be as applicable and useful as possible.

Victoria shared the context for the project at Wiltshire Council – looking at options for Adult Social Care commissioning, focussing on creating genuine alliances with suppliers, and supporting innovation. Through the project time was given over to deep engagement with a wide range of internal stakeholders as the council considered its options for sourcing in the future. 

Victoria credits this time spent in the early stages of the procurement lifecycle engaging with stakeholders as critical to the success of the project, with it adding significant value in terms of choosing the correct delivery models and appropriately specifying the service, and ensuring the council was ready to go out to tender on time.

Katie spoke about Warwick District Councils plans for a Hydrogen Hub, part of their ambitious plans for net zero. Through the project Warwick were able to undertake significant market engagement which provided valuable insight into potential delivery models, and enabled the council to test its thinking about the project. Developing a PIN which set a clear framework for discussion with suppliers also ensured that the market engagement created as much value for the council as possible.

Overall both speakers reflected on the importance of putting time into the planning and preparation stage of the sourcing lifecycle – which is a key principle of the sourcing playbook where you can find more information about the tools and techniques that might be used.

The speakers both valued the impact of stakeholder engagement, whether internal or external, and were keen to stress the benefits they had seen through investing time in convening workshops.

Simon Bandy, Senior Strategy Director at Local Partnerships closed the session by reflecting on some of the lessons learned across the Hands-on sourcing support programme. He highlighted the huge £ value of local government third party spend, and the importance of good sourcing practice to ensure value for money and quality service delivery. Putting aside time for planning and market engagement, early on, can ensure that there is a clear understanding of objectives, the most appropriate tools and procurement options given these objectives and the time available to achieve them. This requires the prioritisation of procurement, which can often slip down the list of priorities with everything else that local government has going on. To help with this it is important to think of procurement not as something done by a team in the corporate centre, but at the heart of how services achieve their objectives. This approach can help manage risk and enable continuous improvement.

The sourcing playbook can be found here.

Further case studies from the hands on sourcing programme can be found here.

Sourcing Playbook learning through doing – watch the webinar