How we put our rural community in the driver’s seat for public transport procurement
In 2014, I helped local government in rural Scotland pioneer community engagement in public transit procurement, something that only major cities like Porto Alegre and Barcelona had done before. The result wasn’t just a 10% saving and an initial increase in usage of 15% but also a community that had real power in co-designing £2.4m of public services.
Lots of public bodies at national and local level like to talk about community empowerment, don’t they? That’s because promoting community empowerment is perhaps the holy grail of participatory democracy. Many politicians and policy makers believe that getting communities more involved in what tax payers money should be spent on and, more importantly, why, will lead to improved outcomes for people and their communities. And there’s plenty of evidence to back this up.
For procurement, tasked with delivering more for less, increasing community empowerment could also mean that the ever-decreasing pot of cash available to spend on public services could actually be deployed in a more effective way. Public transport is often at the sharp end of scrutiny and the victim of indiscriminate budget cuts.
Empowerment and public procurement
So, what we can we do in procurement? How could we promote community empowerment and what benefits could that bring? Procurement is most commonly known for its rules, processes and compliance culture. At first I must admit I also thought the same. It was hard to think that community empowerment would ever be able to bend and fit into procurement’s tight and seemingly pre-set mould.
But then I discovered Participatory Budgeting which had been practiced in Brazil for a number of years. It’s an approach that gives local people a direct say in how, and where, public funds can be used to address local needs.
It started in a place called Porto Alegre in southern Brazil over a decade or so ago. The first phase of participatory budgeting was to get people together to prioritise how money should be spent. Should it be parks, water, schools or roads? People at the grass roots of the community were asked to come together in neighbourhood assemblies and most important make the decisions on how that money was spent. As the process matured people were able to take decisions at a less strategic and more operational level. From choices between thematic areas, to choices between services within a theme, then to choices about what the specification for that service should be.
So, people at the front-end determining priorities. Surely that’s what we do in procurement when we’re out there engaging with our stakeholders? Could we use this approach to community empowerment to help transform the role of procurement?
Community empowerment the procurement way
What they’d done in Brazil was a good start, but how could we shift control even more directly to people’s hands I thought. How could we really empower communities through procurement?
To have a look at how this might be done I moved on to another example — Spain. I zoomed in on a city which features on a daily basis in my house, and probably every household that has soccer crazy kids in their midst. But the real reason why Barcelona is a great place isn’t the sublime football at the Camp Nou.
It’s their approach to public procurement using open problems that was the real wow factor for me. Instead of coming up with a specification for a service, they’ve specified the problem, and then gone to the market and asked suppliers to solve it. They asked people from geographic communities, or communities of interest, to identify what needs they have, and then turned it over to the world’s entrepreneurs to solve them.
Barcelona’s approach was successful. They had 50,000 views of their contract notices, and ultimately closed six contracts for priorities like bike theft and collaborative ways to tackle social isolation. They understood that communities don’t always know the answer to what they need at the outset — they just know they have a problem. I found this method compelling: A government describes what they want to change and then chooses the best answer from a range of options, some of which they might not even have considered. This was very powerful and procurement was right at the heart of it.
Going Remote and Rural
But is it just in big cities and the regions where these community empowerment approaches might work? Could we use them in remote and rural locations? My final destination was to transport services, to my own local government in the Outer Hebrides, an island chain off the west coast of Scotland with a population of just under 26,000.
We wanted to improve community empowerment and link it to a procurement process, so we combined the approaches of Porto Alegre and Barcelona. We used a bus service contract that was put in place for three years and totalled £2.4m. But we turned the requirements on its head. We went out to the market to seek travel solutions for people without cars — that’s the problem we wanted to solve. And we embedded community engagement along the entirety of the procurement process.
First we engaged with the community through face to face consultation events in every locality and through a community wide survey to identify needs. This let our community lead the specification development — they identified the needs, then prioritised them to establish in what order these should be addressed. We used a fixed budget for the requirement so that we could set evaluation criteria which allowed quality to be the driver of success.
You can see our Overview scenarios here. We developed these examples of quality scoring with different weightings to show to the community how different choices for the evaluation criteria weightings would impact outcomes.
The community also determined the evaluation criteria by which the winners would be chosen. It was interesting to see that, for example, one community weighted the timetable for the service as most important while in another the customer engagement came out on top. This was a real reflection of how community attitudes and requirements differ and how a one size fits all approach would have removed our ability to meet actual needs.
In a second step we brought together community panels of up to 15 people to evaluate and score the tenders (RfPs) that were received. To ensure diversity panel members were drawn from representative groups — the pupil councils, community councils and older people’s groups and augmented by people from the community who were interested and had engaged in the process. This combined formal and informal community structures something that helped to give the panels legitimacy and credibility.
Here you can read our Evaluation Panel Guidance — provided for the community panels (aged 14–80!) to help them understand the tender evaluation process
Procurement led by people from 14–80 years old
We helped our community by making sure that our processes and tender documentation were clear and all jargon was removed. Tenders were easy to understand and also easy to score by evaluation panel members. To make this possible, we let specialists check the technical aspects relating to licensing and regulations beforehand.
You can see our U&B Buses Output specification — the template we used for the specification — amended as indicated for the different areas where community priorities were different. Also, you can read our guidance notes for transport providers (that were also issued to the community evaluation panels so that they could see what responses we had asked provider to submit).
To make this whole project happen we assembled our project group. The group had its own dynamics: The transport team defended the status quo, yearning to retain the old ways of doing things using input specifications; community workers were creative with their consultation and engagement techniques; corporate policy made sure we didn’t make any strategic blunders. The procurement team facilitated the process and converted all the needs, creativity and service requirements into a winning procurement process and service contract.
In the third stage, we made sure the community engagement didn’t stop when the contract was awarded. We trained up local Community Councils to run the 6-monthly contract management process dealing directly with the transport providers. This allowed services and timetable to flex and change depending on what the passengers and the community determined were the needs.
You can see our Timetable review process — a real life document demonstrating the process for reviewing services during the contract (community led contract management).
With a 5 per cent budget saving delivered over the lifetime of the contract and 10 per cent increase in transport use in year one alone the value creation from our procurement process was clear for everyone to see. Promoting community empowerment as part of the way we do things gives those of us in public procurement, and particularly in transport a real opportunity to shine.
Key take-aways
Trying something new always involves learning lessons along the way. Make sure you factor in plenty of time for the consultation and engagement process — it takes far longer than you anticipate to get it right. Engagement requires planning and patience.
You can see our Post Project Review — the internal document that details how the process we used could be improved.
Also, we learnt the importance that your route to market should facilitate a conversation with your suppliers. We used a “competitive dialogue” process the second time around which allowed providers to submit proposals for us to feedback and for them to learn and adapt to the new approach too.
As communities engage more they develop the capacity to focus more on outcomes not outputs. Increasingly, they will be able to imagine more innovative ways to meet their needs — who knows what the future will bring.
Why this is great for procurement professionals
As procurement professionals, we had a chance to showcase our talent — getting the right people to have the right input into the procurement process at the right time.
It’s was also a chance for us to stretch ourselves and learn new techniques. To work with different types of people, using different engagement techniques, at different points in the procurement process.
And importantly, it was the chance to deliver more for less, to provide real answers to the challenges of the austerity that lies ahead and hand real power back to the people who should be the ones to yield it.
