Maximising the benefit of public spend

When public resources are tight, questions around how and where we spend money is of paramount importance.  Efficiencies need to be made, but we should also seek greater effectiveness from the goods and services which the public sector procures. Over the last six years, CLES has undertaken a number of pieces of work exploring how and where local authorities procure and importantly how maximum benefit can be extracted from the process for local people, the local economy and communities.  Our engagement in this procurement work has come about for three reasons.

• we wanted to understand the benefit procurement spend brought for local economies.
• we wanted to dispel some of the myths associated with procurement and change cultures in local government procurement teams.
• we wanted to influence the behaviour of authorities and the supply chain to ensure spend reaped maximum local economic benefit.

As such there are 10 considerations when seeking to do procurement more progressively.