Mission delivery: Exploring how procurement can support mission-driven governments
Background
Over the last few years, a range of governments from international to city level have adopted missions as a key part of their strategy. The Camden Renewal Commission, set up by Camden Council in London, explored new ways forward for the borough in the aftermath of COVID-19. The Commission helped define four key missions for the Council’s new strategy We Make Camden:
1. Estates: By 2030, Camden’s estates and their neighbourhoods are healthy, sustainable and unlock creativity.
2. Food: By 2030, everyone eats well every day with nutritious, affordable, sustainable food
3. Diversity: By 2030, those holding positions of power in Camden are as diverse as our community — and the next generation are ready to follow.
4. Young people: By 2025, every young person has access to economic opportunity that enables them to be safe and secure.
Mission-driven governments need new tools and ways of working — otherwise ‘missions’ are just another name for priorities. Our latest report, Mission-led procurement: Early insights from exploratory work in Camden, looks at the potential of procurement to be used in a strategic way to enable delivery.
Public procurement in UK local authorities predominantly conceptualises value for money in terms of lowest cost. This makes it difficult to justify selecting suppliers based on wider public value that they may provide and reduces the strategic importance of procurement in delivering policy goals.
The report identified four opportunity areas in which Camden might be able to adopt a more mission- led approach to procurement:
1. Embrace a market-shaping mindset, and recognise that the Council can take an ecosystem leadership role in which it creates a shared vision, secures co-investment from partners, and supports potential suppliers to build their own aligned capabilities.
2. Move towards an outcome commissioning model, rather than specifying outputs or inputs, and embed those outcomes throughout the commissioning and procurement process for widespread awareness.
3. Take a place-based lens by identifying how different areas of spend (such as social care, youth services, estate management, and green spaces) intersect in real places and the feedback between them.
4. Embed a culture that places less emphasis on risk management and cost reduction, and more on impact, innovation and learning.
A range of organisational and individual capabilities are required to enable a mission-led procurement approach. At the root of all of those skills is the “need for an understanding of what we’re trying to achieve,” seeing the strategic relevance of each act of procurement in its wider context, rather than just applying legal, financial and regulatory expertise.
Roundtable discussion
The IIPP Policy Studio aims to work in the open and share our learning as we move through projects. The report summarises the early insights from phase 1 of our work with Camden, and on 9 March 2023 we brought together a group of experts in the field to discuss their views on mission- led procurement. Several key themes came out of that conversation.
Culture change must support and go beyond the central procurement team
Many of the participants agreed that culture change was critical — and some argued that it should come first. There was strong consensus that this cannot mean a sole focus on the central procurement team, with senior management trying to impose a new culture from above. Rather, it has to be about supporting and enabling that team to be creative and feel like they have agency. The teams working in procurement need to navigate their own way through a problem and towards delivering a mission. That means that other teams need to see procurement colleagues as a core part of the team and a partner, rather than a gatekeeper.
The city of Haarlem has trialled an innovative approach to creating a culture that supports procurement teams to prioritise climate friendly options. They have created a special fund which can be drawn down on to cover additional costs of selecting a ‘green’ option when buying goods. In the end, the fund has not actually been heavily used because those products have often been the same price — but it has created the permission to look for something different in the first place.
One risk was raised on creating a culture of learning: within government, internal political capital is often linked to successes, which means there is a strong incentive to not to report or communicate widely about failures — but failure is a necessary part of innovation and learning.
Procurement can go further in supporting good employment
Camden has been a Living Wage accredited employer since 2012, and has recently extended the Living Wage to all of its apprentices. Since 2015 the Council has had a minimum earnings guarantee, which sets minimum pay above the Living Wage. The Council works closely with Timewise on how to provide flexibility within contracts to address inequalities and maintain the attractiveness of local government roles in difficult recruitment markets.
We heard examples of how other councils — including Greater Manchester — are addressing some of the non-pay elements of what makes good work. This includes ‘living hours,’ which sets the expectation of at least four weeks’ notice period for shifts, and a guaranteed minimum of 16 hours per week.
Outcomes commissioning needs to be relational and driven by shared values, not targets
There was strong push back on the idea of outcomes commissioning — at least to the extent that it simply replaces ‘outputs’ with ‘outcomes’ in a contract. The problem of trying to contract for outcomes is that they are always outside of the control of a single organisation — and we have to recognise that the outcomes we are trying to create are driven by a huge range of direct and indirect factors. Making payment to suppliers conditional on those outcomes being achieved is therefore asking them to take responsibility (and financial risk) for something over which they have only limited control.
That’s not to say an outcomes orientation is not useful — and the group supported the idea of talking more about the overall outcomes that you are trying to achieve throughout the commissioning and procurement process. They remain useful objectives, but they require different mechanisms to be effective.
Procurement systems are not designed from the perspective of suppliers or citizens
The user experience of procurement systems as a supplier can be very poor. Portals are often difficult to navigate and applications are often very long and written in inaccessible language. This creates significant barriers to entry, especially for small companies and community groups or charities who might be well placed to deliver some local government services. They are less likely to have the in -house expertise that is often required to make a successful application. There is a service design challenge here — to reimagine the procurement system from the point of view of suppliers.
Citizens also often struggle to access and interpret information about public sector procurement, which is an impediment to scrutiny and democratic accountability. To the extent that procurement is made transparent and visible to citizens, it is often through consultations or the publication of technical documents. This is a missed opportunity, and the group threw down a great challenge: how could procurement be used as a moment of deep democratic engagement — before, during and after the contract being awarded? And how could procurement be opened up to greater public engagement through storytelling and clearer language?
There are insufficient resources across the system
Our interviews with Camden officers had highlighted the pressure that procurement teams are under, especially in light of austerity from 2010. The Council recognises that change will require investment. But lack of resource is a problem across the system. Both commissioning organisations and potential suppliers often end up feeling like the procurement process is rushed — this raises the question of whether there are different ways to organise the process, and potentially moving more towards co-development of tenders.
Data is currently poor and patchy, but new legislation should go some way to addressing this
A common complain amongst participants was that the lack of data on local authority procurement made it difficult to analyse and understand. This resonates with our findings from Camden — although they are making significant efforts to improve the quality of their data, it is currently highly fragmented. The Council has an ongoing project looking at how data on the social value aspects of contracts — both what was promised and what is delivered — can be pulled together for a coherent overview.
New regulation will place additional duties on contracting authorities to collect and share procurement data, but this will require a significant change to the systems and practices of local authorities. In light of the point above — additional responsibilities imposed by central government but without additional resources may have adverse effects, leaving already stretched teams with a lot to do and less time for the long term, strategic conversations that would enable mission-led procurement.
Next steps
Based on the challenges and opportunities identified so far, we are creating a set of ‘problem briefs’ to respond to. In the next phase of the project, we will design and test interventions under a selection of these; the remaining problem briefs can be used by Camden as they take the work forwards, and other contracting authorities that are interested in experimenting with a mission-led procurement approach.
