News & Blog

Check out this page to find out what we've been up to, hear our honest take on the state of play in commissioning and procurement, and to keep up to date with the latest developments at Candour Collaborations!

Transforming Rehabilitation Information Events for VCSE providers

Candour Collaborations,  ACEVO and NCVO have been awarded a grant from the Ministry of Justice to deliver a series of events to the VCSE sector to raise awareness and understanding of the Transforming Rehabilitation competition.

The series of events will run throughout the competition at a number of locations across the country and will cover everything from general information to in-depth sessions on TUPE implications (further details below). The events will be aimed at VCSE organisations wishing to participate in the competition and aim to present an honest view of the procurement process including the potential operational and commercial challenges.

Most of the events will be held on a regional basis and attendance will not be restricted by the region your organisation is based in, please attend the event which is most convenient to you. However, the Networking events will be held at Contract Package Area (CPA) level so we would ask that you only attend these events in the areas that you are interested in delivering in. These events will provide a forum for the shortlisted prime contractors in each CPA to introduce themselves to the VCSE sector.

Please see the links below for further details:

When it rains, it pours: (weather) forecasting of commissioning activity

In a slightly random and tangential way, our latest blog compares commissioning and procurement activity to the side effects of global warming: full of droughts, and floods.

Obviously, commissioning doesn’t have much to do with increased levels of carbon dioxide (though you could argue commissioners can be full of hot air), but I’m sure you get the symbolism. We go through periods when there are too many tender opportunities to manage, and others when there is nothing out there to bid for. But can, and do, commissioners consider other government departments’ commissioning pipelines when they consider their own?

Arguably, it’s not always practically possible to work cross-departmentally in this way. Each department has timeframes for their commissioning activity, sometimes linked to somewhat arbitrary goals like Christmas, others slightly less so – the end of the financial year, or even general elections. But if commissioners did plan collaboratively, surely it would be a good thing? Both in terms of demand – the market being able to submit high-quality bids – and in terms of supply – commissioners taking into account other complementary, aligned or even counter-effective procurement activity, considering the effects of this, and designing their commissioning to have a positive multiplier effect, rather than the opposite.

So how do we at Candour Collaborations see the current state of play? As a broad rule, public sector procurement comes in peaks and troughs. Summertime can be worryingly quiet, yet Christmas can be manic. I don’t know any business development professionals who haven’t had to work at least one Christmas Day. Right now, in two of our core markets – employability and skills – contractors of services to the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and Skills Funding Agency (SFA) are looking for the ‘next big show in town’. For many, this will be the National Careers Service procurement, which was due to be competed in July 2012. Following significant delays (do we call them ‘significant’ when we’ve already been waiting 13 months?!), it is now anticipated to be tendered relatively soon.

However, with the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) having just commenced Transforming Rehabilitation procurement, worth up to £20bn over the next ten years, few in the marketplace will have sufficient resources to bid directly for both. Yet it’s completely logical that a company that delivers adult employability services via DWP Work Programme may also be interested in bidding for similar provision to young people through the Education Funding Agency (EFA), or to ex-offenders through MoJ, or to also deliver accredited training to these same people via SFA.

And if it all kicks off at once, does anyone but the ‘big fish’ have the required capacity and capability in-house to deal with simultaneous, highly-demanding, and strategically significant tenders? When turnaround times for submission are ridiculously short, this puts even greater pressure on many organisations to make choices about what they do and don’t bid for. Especially those smaller, local organisations which cannot afford to simply throw money at consultancy or temporary resources. This gives larger companies with greater resources a clear competitive advantage.  And it’s not exactly a rare occurrence.

To illustrate the point, we once had an important tender released to market on the 20^th December, with a turnaround of just 10 days, whilst working simultaneously on two other bids…in a team of three. So that’s any hope of seasonal festivities out of the window, then! We buckled down, prioritised and worked day and night to get good-quality bids submitted. Just because commissioners can accelerate procurement rounds doesn’t mean they should.

What can we do about it, though? We can build in contingency planning around potential commissioning delays to minimise the impact of their occurrence, we can advocate for fair tender timescales, and we can create additional funding to support smaller organisations to compete on a larger scale (as the ICRF fund aims to do). We can try to work with commissioners so that they, when possible, publish their commissioning intentions (as some do already: MoJ, DWP) and that when planning procurement, they consider the pipelines of other departments. But this doesn’t stop departments commissioning something that significantly deviates from their published documents.

Commissioners and wider Government say they want a competitive and diverse provider base. As we have all seen, their activity can actually drive the opposite.  It isn’t just about timing of procurement rounds either (I should probably insert something here about temperate weather conditions…), it’s about the resource implications of implementing multiple contracts, and the cash flow issues created by a wider move to Payment by Results contracting as standard. This is a challenging time, and a challenging marketplace to compete in. Many organisations are already having difficulty adapting to the changing environment.  We should celebrate and encourage a diverse provider base, which can help people to address a range of needs. Yet how can they win the contracts to do so when they’re all busy carrying around massive metaphorical brollies, sun glasses and buckets of suntan lotion?

Let us know your thoughts, via Contact Us.

Big Society Capital publishes Justice Market Statement

Big Society Capital recently published their Justice Market Statement , setting out social investment options for primes and tier 1 and 2 providers interested in getting involved in the Transforming Rehabilitation procurement process. This is expected to kick off over the next couple of weeks, so we were interested to explore their ideas for supporting market engagement and participation.

In general, their Statement is short and sweet. However, one thing really caught our eye – as a ‘wholesaler’, BSC is only able to invest in ‘intermediaries’. This normally refers to social investment specialists such as Big Issue Invest and CAF Venturesome, but their current definition is pretty vague:  ‘organisations that sub-contract at least 50% of contract value to social sector organisations’ and ‘organisations that provide a range of services (e.g. performance management, contract management, negotiation support) for subcontractor social sector organisations’. Does this mean that, in principle, private sector primes could be backed by social investors?

We think that this relatively wide definition presents an excellent opportunity for new consortia and social primes to emerge as intermediaries, cutting out ‘middle man’ costs and additional rates of return on investment which we know to be prohibitive to organisations considering social investment. It could (and in our opinion, should) introduce a greater level of delivery-based expertise and operational understanding into the social investment market. Something that is sorely lacking right now. This can only be a good thing.

What are the other implications of BSC potentially opening up the market to new kinds of intermediary? Should private sector primes be able to access social investment if it is going to flow down into the smaller organisations that actually need it, or should they be willing to invest the required levels of capital directly? Let us know your take, via Contact Us, or get in touch directly.

DWP consultation on Work Programme

The Department for Work and Pensions will tomorrow launch its consultation on the development of their 2013 commissioning strategy for welfare-to-work services. It will be seeking views on how to use private, voluntary, community and public sector providers to deliver future services. We were largely pleased with the Ministry of Justice’s recent consultation process into probation reform, and their inclusion of many challenges presented by providers in their ‘A Strategy for Reform’ consultation response. We hope that the welfare-to-work provider base also comes up with constructive, commercial ideas for improving future service provision – and that the DWP listens.

Further Reading

£150,000 grant for third sector as they bid for rehabilitation contracts

Candour led the development of the Action Plan (see more in Criminal Justice) and we are delighted to be working on the next phase of delivery with ACEVO and NCVO to bring some of our recommendations to life. We want this grant to have a lasting, positive impact by enabling VCSE organisations to make informed decisions about the Transforming Rehabilitation reforms.

In partnership with ACEVO and NCVO, we will deliver 57 workshops across England and Wales, which will be linked to the Transforming Rehabilitation procurement timetable. We’ll update the site with details of the workshops as details are finalised.

Further Reading