Context
Cherwell District Council has published its spend above £500 in order to be transparent and allow anyone to view what we have spent our money on. The data download contains all payments made by the council and has been provided as a means for others to analyse as they see fit. However, please note that the spend information within the Spotlight on Spend database does not include grants and expenditure with other public organisations such as councils and central government departments.
For residents
Whenever we buy services, we always evaluate whether it is most cost effective to provide a service in-house or to source it externally. We’ve often found that the most cost effective option is to use companies who bring expertise from their market knowledge, and while we still provide a good deal of services in-house we have where appropriate contracted out services. A register of our current large contracts can be found at http://www.cherwell.gov.uk/media/pdf/h/h/Contracts_Register_July_2010.pdf
You will see that our spend with small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) is a massive 65% and some 18% higher than the English council average. What’s more is that we spend 23% locally equating to 7% more than other English councils.
One of the reasons our spend per household is a massive 58% lower than the average is our constant focus on costs and reducing expenditure via efficient working practices while maintaining or improving the quality of services to residents.
Working with others to deliver your services
In the last year we have collaborated with other parts of the public sector in delivering services to the local community. We spent £500,000 in providing the new extended hours health centre with the PCT on Bridge Street in office space owned by the Council and made available as part our cost reduction programme. We have also joined forces with Thames Valley Police in the upgrade of our community CCTV system and have collaborated with other councils in the delivery of public toilet cleaning, both improving the standards and driving down the costs by a massive 18%.
For suppliers
We try to ensure that doing business with the council is as fair and easy as possible for all suppliers. Our website contains useful information for those wishing to sell to the council, and lists all currently available contracts.
It is anticipated that the council will spend in the region of £10million on a range of goods and services from third parties in the financial year 2010 to 2011. As with all councils, we are faced with declining budgets and need to obtain the maximum benefit from the goods and services we buy and/or provide, within the resources available to us.
We are also committed to doing all we can to place orders for goods and services with local businesses and organisations, particularly SMEs as demonstrated by our signing up to the Small Business Friendly Concordat, a voluntary non-statutory code of practice whose purpose is to set out what SMEs supplying local government can expect when tendering for local authority contracts. In practice this means that we offer working with the council workshops for the majority of tenders and that we will breakdown our needs into lots allowing smaller companies to bid – such as our range of building services contracts we have been putting in place over the last six months. We obviously can’t give any company an unfair advantage over another, but we do ensure that all suppliers are treated equally and that SMEs have an opportunity to compete. We also undertake to help small businesses by paying their invoices in fourteen days.