By Keith Aitken in Edinburgh | 24 April 2014
Scotland’s local authorities saved £71m last year through more efficient spending of their aggregate £5.4bn procurement budget, but more can be done to boost collaboration and develop better purchasing skills among staff, the Accounts Commission has said today.
The watchdog’s Procurement in councils report found there was improved performance across the 32 Scottish councils in 2012/13, but some inconsistencies remained.
‘Some councils have done well by looking at all the options, investing in the right skills and systems and learning from each other,’ commission chair Douglas Sinclair said. ‘But there is scope to do a lot more and the pace of improvement needs to increase.
‘Councils need to secure maximum value for the money they spend as budgets continue to tighten. Better use of procurement can improve quality and bring benefits to their local communities.’
Much of the saving were the result of more collaborative spending, a key theme of both the 2006 McLelland Report on public procurement and the 2011 Christie Report on reforming service delivery. This has been encouraged by the Scottish Government through collaborative contracts, and last year the amount spent through shared procurement was more than £503m, around 9% of total spending and an increase of 80% over the past three years.
The Accounts Commission’s audit comes ahead of a third reading at Holyrood for the Scottish Government’s Procurement Bill, which aims to make it easier for smaller local companies to compete for deals and for councils to penalise unethical employment activities such as blacklisting.
The commission predicted that both the legislation and recent European Union reforms would have a major impact on procurement deals. ‘Procurement now has a higher profile and councils are buying more goods and services collaboratively,’ the report stated. ‘New legislation and EU directives will bring about further change.
‘Councils can use procurement to improve service quality and achieve benefits for the community. Councils are systematically using procurement spending to support local economic development. Councils have recently begun to make community benefits, such as apprenticeships and environmental improvements, an integral part of contracts.’
The report also called for further action to make savings through improvements to procurement, and for better collection and dissemination of data on the savings made.
Labour’s local government spokeswoman, Sarah Boyack said ministers had an opportunity to use the Procurement Bill to that ensure firms that won public contracts paid at the Living Wage. However, the government had failed to back a Labour amendment to introduce this.
