procurement

Community Wealth Building

What is Community Wealth Building, why is it important, and what has CLES been doing about it?

Over the past 10 years, CLES has amassed a body of work around Community Wealth Building and Anchor Organisations in Greater Manchester, Preston, Birmingham and 11 cities across Europe. This pioneering work is focused on building an economy where wealth – including the spend of local anchor organisations – is recirculated locally for the benefit of local communities.

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  • DISCUSSION PAPER

    Opportunities for Public Procurement Post-Brexit

    12th October 2017
    179.8kB     .pdf
    Brexit presents a significant opportunity for UK Government and place based anchor institutions to re-shape legislation around pub...

  • CLES develop procurement strategy with Nagykallo

    27 Jul. 2017

    • 10 ways to engage SMEs in procurement

    Historically Small to Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs) have faced a range of barriers in accessing procurement opportunities and in winning contracts. These barriers include: contracting authorities being unaware of SMEs and the types of goods and services they can potentially provide; SMEs viewing the procurement process, often rightly, as overly bureaucratic; SMEs not having the capacity to bid for opportunities and compete with large business; and the process of procurement often being undertaken on the basis of cost thus ruling out the ability of SMEs to demonstrate their wider value.

    Whilst these barriers still exist, the European Procurement Directives of 2014 have a specific focus on supporting SMEs to engage with procurement processes. There is a specific emphasis upon: contracting authorities simplifying the process of procurement; contracting authorities breaking opportunities down into smaller lots; and reducing the levels of turnover required to participate in tendering exercise. At the last meeting of the Procure network held in Koprivnica, Croatia in March 2017, we wanted to explore how the above principles were translating into reality at the city level and what activities could be undertaken by cities to more effectively engage SMEs and local organisations in procurement. Collectively we identified 10 key ways which relate to common barriers:

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    Progressing procurement processes and practice in Manchester

    Around ten years ago, the Centre for Local Economic Strategies (CLES) started undertaking work around public procurement. Our interest in procurement was three-fold. First, we wanted to understand more effectively where procurement spend went and the impact in particular it had upon local economies. Second, we wanted to shift the behaviour of procurement officers so that a wider range of factors informed the procurement decision. Third, we wanted to influence the behaviour of suppliers so that they delivered greater benefits for local economies and people through the provision of goods and services.

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  • PROJECT REPORT

    The Power of Procurement II: The policy and practice of Manchester City Council

    28th February 2017
    752.4kB     .pdf
    This 2018 report describes how Manchester City Council has made their procurement practice more progressive, and the impact of thi...

  • Community wealth benefits locals

    01 Feb. 2017
  • PROJECT REPORT

    Community wealth building through anchor institutions

    1st February 2017
    206.9kB     .pdf
    This 2017 report documents 6 years of local wealth building work with anchor institutions in Preston......

    • Social Value – the key role of Commissioning and Procurement

    At the Greater Manchester Social Value Network (GMSVN) we are seeking to ensure that social value is embedded in everything that Greater Manchester as a place does. That means social value being at the heart of Greater Manchester strategy and embedded in the DNA of the public sector, businesses and the voluntary and community sector.

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    Enhancing social benefits through procurement

    This article was written by Matthew Jackson and first published by URBACT.
    Matthew Jackson is the Lead Expert for the Procure network and the Deputy Chief Executive of CLES.
     

    There has often been a misnomer that procurement processes cannot consider innovation in procurement and particularly criteria around economic, social environmental benefits because it contravenes the European Procurement Directives and specifically requirements around competitiveness. This misnomer has meant that procurers across Europe have often not considered innovation in procurement and have instead focused purely upon the cost of the product or the service being procured.

    At the last meeting of the Procure Network in Albacete in December 2016, we explored how this misnomer could be overcome and particularly how social criteria could be built into the various stages of the procurement cycle. Indeed, the European Directives are now actively encouraging municipalities and others to utilise the process of procurement to achieve wider social and environmental goals and suggests three main ways of doing this.

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    The importance of procurement to city economies

    This article explores why procurement is increasingly being seen as a way of addressing some of the economic, social and environmental issues facing our cities. It does this through reflecting on: the legislative framework for procurement; the activities of the Procure network; the importance of understanding where procurement spend goes; and how social considerations can be more effectively embedded into procurement processes.

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  • CLES continues to advance a good local economy across Europe

    31 May. 2016