County Council-backed Procurement Charter boosting local businesses

Since the Federation of Small Business launched its “Small Business Friendly Procurement Charter” in 2013, Warwickshire County Council has been taking huge steps to ensure its procurement practices are even simpler and quicker than before – it’s all part of the council’s ongoing commitment to helping local SMEs.

The FSB procurement charter was developed in conjunction with the County Council and is designed to encourage local authorities to provide a seamless procurement process for local small firms.

This followed extensive research from the FSB which revealed that if all local authorities spent an additional five per cent of their budget locally - and committed just three per cent more of that to small local firms - an additional £788 million would have been generated for local economies.

An exclusive report by the FSB found that during 2013-2014 local authorities spent a total of £8.7 billion buying goods and services in their local area. The report highlighted how doing business locally is better value for money as it showed that, for every £1 spent with a small or medium-sized business (SME), 63p was re-spent in the local area, compared to 40p in every £1 spent with a larger business. In 2014 Warwickshire County Council contracted with 6,794 suppliers, 52% of which were small businesses employing 20 people or fewer.

So what steps have the county’s Procurement Team taken to help local SMEs?  A whole collection of measures have been introduced to make procuring with the Local Authority as simple as possible. These measures range from:

• Revised and simpler tender documentation
• Developing the web-site warwickshire.gov.uk/procurement to improve the information and guidance available to potential tenders
• Using social media to promote WCC’s opportunities to local small businesses
• Running ‘Meet the Contractor’ events and pre-tender briefings
• Actively seeking quotes from local suppliers
• Reviewing insurance requirements to enable small businesses to quote when there is no need for high insurance

The county council has also led the development of www.csw-jets.co.uk, a joint e-tendering system (CSW-JETS) for the sub-region (Coventry, Warwickshire and Solihull).  Nine local authorities now use the system, providing a single platform for tendering which allows SMEs to access all the opportunities across the sub-region via a single sign-on and to receive automatic alerts of relevant business opportunities.

This also links directly to Warwickshire’s B2B portal - free to businesses - and encourages collaboration and local sourcing.  Registration is partnered with ‘CSW-JETS’ and uses the same log-in details reducing the need for multiple registrations across sites by local businesses. To access B2B please visit: https://in-tendhost.co.uk/WarwickshireB2B/aspx/B2B_Home

Linsey Luke, Development Manager at FSB Coventry & Warwickshire said:

“The FSB has been working with Warwickshire County Council for a number of years to develop a more streamlined procurement process for small firms.

"The Council has always been a great supporter of helping local small businesses access contracts and, in 2013, helped the FSB develop a procurement charter that aims to encourage local authorities to provide a seamless procurement process for local small firms. This charter was adopted nationally and many other local authorities are now doing more business with small firms as a result.

"The statistics in this report prove that those steps being taken by Warwickshire County Council have ensured that small firms in general, but also those located in the area, are benefiting. This is great news for our small businesses. The FSB will continue to work with the Council as they build on this good work and we hope that many more local small firms will benefit as a result.”

To find out more information about the FSB’S Small Business Friendly Procurement Charter please visit: www.fsb.org.uk/policy/assets/local-procurement-2013.pdf