Lancashire Supplier Charter is opening the door to business

A £1bn annual spend on more than 500 contracts with more than 1,000 different suppliers is a lot to manage.

Recognising this, Lancashire County Council has unveiled a new Suppliers Charter, outlining a new approach to build stronger relationships with organisations that help deliver services across Lancashire.

The council says becoming not only a strong commissioner, but a better client, is key to delivering better outcomes. That means engaging with suppliers and partners earlier, being clearer about future opportunities and creating opportunities for organisations to help shape services before procurement begins.

And at its first Supplier and Partner Forum, which brought together more than 160 people from across the public, private and voluntary sectors, the council demonstrated its commitment to better engagement with the businesses and organisations it works with and wants to work with in the future.

Vic Dhillon, head of commercial at the council, emphasises the need for better engagement with the market in outlining why a Suppliers Charter was needed now.

He says: “We were very internally focused and we had done things the same way for a long time. I think the marketplace felt it was a kind of closed shop. This was around saying we need to be more transparent.

“We need to realise and recognise publicly that we need these partnerships and external suppliers to deliver to our customers, our mutual customers, our residents.

“Instead of just going to the market at the end, engage early.”

At the event he called on potential suppliers: “Come and meet us. Come and do some sessions where we have webinars where we can tell you more.

“We are going to put out more expressions of interest saying we are looking at doing this - who wants to have a conversation?

“We need to get our organisation to engage. That is why we need the charter. And we need to show what the rules are.”

The charter sets out how Lancashire County Council and its suppliers will work together in future, with shared expectations around earlier engagement, open communication, transparency and long term partnership working.

Vic says the initial response has been positive and, while acknowledging it will take time for a new culture to become embedded, he has already noticed a shift.

He says: “We got some great feedback from the forum and we are already starting to put in place the next ones. People are really impressed by the desire to work with the market more than we ever have.

“I am getting parts of the organisation coming to me and saying: ‘You did this supplier thing, we have something, we want to do a market engagement’.

“That is really positive. Things won’t happen overnight, but it is a great start.”

The council is also talking a great deal about social value, including supporting apprenticeships. And while it is acknowledged there is more thinking to do in this area, there is a genuine will to incorporate social value into future procurements and commissioning.

Vic says: “Social value is really important to us. Apprenticeships are massively important to us. How do we make that more transparent and more accessible for people?

“One of our strategic aspirations is civic pride. We need to be using this new framework to support these aims.

“Commerciality is not about cost cutting. It is about delivering better outcomes and doing more with our money.”

Vic says there is also recognition that not all smaller businesses are set up to bid for big council contracts and that this can be a barrier to working with the council. A new framework will support SMEs to work with the council and reduce the amount of bureaucracy that can get in the way.

“We have set ourselves a challenge. Are we going out to enough people in the market to make this accessible?”

“We are going beyond our comfort zone of ‘we have always worked with these people’ and opening ourselves up and saying to other organisations and businesses: ‘Come work with Lancashire’.

“If we do more meet the buyer events, hopefully we will get to more people.

“It is about momentum. When people have started to work with us and they tell others, then more people become interested and you create that momentum.”

But with the much publicised local government reorganisation on the horizon, which will see Lancashire County Council broken up along with the other 14 local authorities in Lancashire and replaced with four unitary authorities, will this work be continued going forward?

Vic adds: “It is really important we say those new unitaries will make their own decisions.

“However, if we are working to the principles of the charter in the commissioning and procurement we are doing now, then that approach will live through the transition.

“If we get this right, those principles will work and will be adapted. And that's the right thing to do.”

So what does the future look like? Vic, while cautious of making predictions, feels positive.

He says: “The market will feel more accessible and transparent.

“There will be much more dialogue and people will help Lancashire and its successor organisations build the solutions.

“In an ideal world, we will have different organisations in the value chain - private, public and voluntary - delivering different parts of a seamless service to our residents.

“It would be wonderful if, in three years' time, we are seeing organisations that have done some work with us and grown to become bigger businesses.

“If we could see that more organisations in Lancashire are growing through their partnerships and we are helping them skill up to be more resilient, wouldn't that be brilliant?”