National Advisory Group (NAG) for Procurement e-bulletin: 20 April 2020

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National Advisory Group (NAG) for Procurement Covid-19 Bulletin

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Weekly Procurement e-bulletin, Monday 20 April 2020

Welcome to the NAG and SOPO newsletter for 20 April 2020. Feel free to circulate to your colleagues.

This newsletter is now delivered through our corporate service that handles all our various e-bulletins. Manage or create a subscription.

Personal protective equipment

We continue to urgently press Government on the need to ensure that councils, care providers and other partner organisations receive the appropriate Personal protective equipment (PPE) as soon as possible, and are working closely with Government as it tackles supply and distribution issues. We believe that all staff who need PPE should have access to it in line with the current Public Health England guidance.

The announced online portal for PPE will allow the scaling up of the delivery system with a new website allowing the health and care system to order from a central inventory. This is expected to be online in three to four weeks’ time.

The National Supply Disruption Response can pick up emergency needs and supply small kits (for example, 100-200 units of each type of PPE). In cases where there is an urgent clinical need for PPE and the organisation has already exhausted all other routes but the Local Resilience Forum (LRF) is unable to meet their request, those organisations should contact the National Supply Disruption Response helpline on 0800 915 9964.

The Government's PPE guidance was updated on 10 April.

In our weekly meeting with the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG), Cabinet Office and Crown Commercial Service  (CCS) today we had colleagues from Department of Health & Social Care who asked us to convey this to you:

It was reiterated that all care providers (including home care) should be able to access the supply routes. Process for them should be:

  1. Try business as usual suppliers and wholesale suppliers
  2. Contact the LRF
  3. If still not able to obtain PPE, call the National Supply Disruption Response

Procurement Policy Note 02/20 FAQs

Cabinet Office has published three Procurement Policy Notes (PPN 01/20, PPN 02/20 and PPN 03/20) to support public bodies in their response to COVID-19. This document brings together a set of frequently asked questions (FAQs) regarding the scope and application of PPN 02/20 on supplier relief. The FAQs will be updated regularly and published on GOV.UK.

Offer coronavirus (COVID-19) support from your business

Councils are encouraged to point bone fide suppliers who can help or have surplus supplies to use this service set up by Government.

Waste Management and Recycling Arrangements

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic there will be an ongoing requirement to ensure continued provision of essential services, one of which is waste collection and disposal.

The LGA and Local Partnerships have been working on a guide to help authorities deal with increasing numbers of enquiries from residents and businesses about waste and recycling collection arrangements. Authorities will have a range of contracts for the collection and disposal of all aspects of waste. This includes municipal, commercial and clinical waste. It is important to work with contractors, ensuring that there is effective communication between key stakeholders so that this essential service can continue.

Read Waste Management and Recycling Arrangements for more about contracts due to expire, contractors seeking to alter or terminate their contracts through force majeure .

If you would like to discuss issues relating to existing waste contracts, or with changes required owing to current circumstances, please contact us, LPenquiries@local.gov.uk

Private Finance Initiative (PFI)

The current pandemic does not, automatically, mean that there will be changes to existing PFI contracts. It is important that during this time there is regular communication between the authority and your special purpose vehicle (SPV), discussing ongoing service provision, resourcing, supply chain issues and any potential changes due to changing circumstances. 

The flexibility and adaptability of contractors and contracts during this current time is essential.  All sectors must work together to resolve issues to achieve a mutually beneficial outcome.  Any solution must ensure that elements are only changed for an appropriate length of time.  Some contractors are actively seeking the easing of contract terms or making claims for financial assistance as a result of the Covid-19 crisis. Procurement policy notes PPN01/20 and PPN02/20 both apply to PFI projects. 

The guidance includes a section Model Interim Payment Terms which provides a set of terms that contracting authorities can use to implement PPN 02/20 and a document containing a number of frequently asked questions (see above)

Should you have any questions regarding your PFI contract, Local Partnerships’ PFI experts can support you in ensuring an appropriate solution is implemented that provides a solution for the current time. Please contact Local Partnerships via email to LPEnquiries@localgov.uk

LGA frequently asked questions related to COVID-19

The LGA has set up a dedicated COVID-19 FAQ page which is updated daily and has a Procurement Section. It also covers other areas so please feel free to pass on the link to colleagues across your organisations. If you have any burning COVID-19 issues, please contact: CoronaVirus.Enquiries@local.gov.uk

Children’s commissioning and procurement

Colleagues of yours in children’s commissioning and procurement might be interested to know about an active pre-existing online knowledge hub group, membership of which consists of over 200 colleagues in local government. It is a group for children’s services procurement professionals, commissioners and consortia leads to ask questions, have discussions, share practice and explore opportunities for closer working, especially whilst councils work on current common challenges. You can request to join the group using this link: https://khub.net/group/national-consortia-network/group-home

Please note: You will need to be a member of the Knowledge Hub for the link to direct you to the joining page for the group. If you have any questions about this, please contact productivity@local.gov.uk

Contacting Crown Commercial Service

CCS has been fielding lots of enquiries and have asked us to communicate your best routes to deal with your COVID-19 requests.

PPN queries, please refer to the Procurement Policy Note 02/20 FAQs which covers PPNs 01/20, 02/20 and 03/20. If your issues can’t be answered by this and is CCS-related then please use this email address: info@crowncommercial.gov.uk

Wider enquiries related to local government policy or strategy should come to us at coronavirus.enquiries@local.gov.uk. These queries are filtered to the relevant COVID-19 teams to deal with and those that can’t are escalated to central government through our weekly meetings with MHCLG, Cabinet Office and CCS.

COVID-19 webinars

CCS is hosting a couple of webinars with colleagues from the Local Government Sector, Cabinet Office, MHCLG and BEIS.

These sessions are an opportunity to submit questions to an expert panel about Procurement Policy Note 02/20 - guidance for public bodies on payment of their suppliers to ensure service continuity during and after the current COVID-19 outbreak.


Events


Free contract management e-learning course

For those of you not involved in front line service delivery and currently being asked to work from home, you might now find some time for some continuing professional development. We negotiated a number of places on the Government Commercial Function’s Building contract and supplier management capability across government contract management e-learning modules. The foundation course aims to help contract managers achieve better outcomes and value for money through informed and timelier contract management decision-making. Over 1,000 council officers have enrolled on the course with 500 alone signing up in the latest cohort. Please get in touch if you or your colleagues are interested to join them. Email productivity@local.gov.uk  

Note: Some of you will have experienced difficulties with logging into this portal and we have been told that we’ll get an update on this soon. Good news is that the free of charge access to the e-learning portal for contract management training has been extended to end of June.

The European Academy is offering online procurement training on:

  • methods and models to support better contracting
  • evaluation of performance
  • digital tools for e-procurement

Effective E-Procurement in the Public Sector
25 May 2020

Risk Management in Public Procurement
29 May 2020

  • identifying and translating risks in contract
  • managing risks and expectations in the tender phase
  • identifying effective risk management tools
  • preventing risks in different phases of the process

Procure to Pay Process Optimisation - Reducing Costs
9 June 2020

  • fraud prevention
  • risk mitigation
  • managing complex contracts