Commissioning

This page is for organisations who are interested in providing services and projects to deliver Leicester’s new Local Area Agreement.

It explains the new LAA arrangements, and the new Area Based Grant, including the Working Neighbourhood Fund element. 

It also explains how the Leicester Partnership will commission services, provides some tips for potential providers, and tells you where you can go for further information and support.

The Leicester Partnership sees the voluntary and community sector as a vital provider of services to help the city meet its targets, and wants to move towards greater public sector commissioning of services from the sector. 

The partnership recognises the value added by organisations that understand the communities they serve – in keeping with the principles of the new Leicester Compact.

1.  The new Local Area Agreement

The Leicester Partnership has to negotiated a new LAA for Leicester with the Government. The agreement consists of a range of targets, many of which will have to be reported to Government every year.

This is a new approach which greatly simplifies and pulls together what in the past has been a complicated system of different targets, different pots of money and different monitoring systems coming in to Leicester from different sources. It will cut down on bureaucracy, help to join up public services more effectively, and allows greater flexibility for local solutions to local circumstances. 

2.  Commissioning services from the Area Based Grant

Many different funding streams are pooled into a single grant from Government to Leicester called the Area Based Grant. For 2008-09 this grant will be around £26m. It will be used, along with other public sector funding, to commission programmes to support the priorities in Leicester’s new Local Area Agreement (LAA).

A lot of the money to be used to deliver the LAA, including much of the Area Based Grant, will go to organisations that have a responsibility to deliver services that the meet the targets. Part of the process of deciding who will get funding to help support the LAA priorities will be through commissioning. Over time we want to ensure the best organisation, whether public, private or VCS, is commissioned to deliver the services that fulfil our local priorities.

As such, for this year, much of the spending of this money will be ‘transitional’. This means that existing programmes will continue to be funded until the council and the delivery groups of the Leicester Partnership decide what programmes need to be commissioned or decommissioned to meet the LAA priorities. The stages and timetable for making these decisions about commissioning and implementing them are set out in the ten step Leicester Partnership Commissioning Framework set out at the end of this document.

3.  The Working Neighbourhoods Fund

Around £7m of the Area Based Grant  has been designated by the Government as a new Working Neighbourhoods Fund. This fund is focussed on tackling worklessness.

We will be inviting expressions of interest from organisations who may want to be considered for delivering services or projects from the WNF over the Summer 2008, with a view to commissioned activities starting in the Autumn.

4.  Developing the commissioning process

The Leicester Partnership commissioning framework tries to ensure that services are commissioned in a way that is:

• based on a robust analysis of need

• effective at meeting those needs;  

• value for money;

• fair and transparent; and

• effective at protecting the public purse and complies with national and European legislation

If you have been involved in delivering NRF activity you will know that in the early stages the new process presented a number of challenges. We have now reviewed the process, and as part of that review we received some very useful feedback from many providers.

Some of the points made were that there was a need for:

• better planning of the process

• clearly identified roles and responsibilities

• better service specifications

• more training and support on specification writing and assessments

• more support for potential service providers

• better resourcing of people to run the process

• ways of tackling conflicts of interest – so that people writing specifications are separate from those who might deliver them

• improvements to tackle inadvertent exclusion and barriers.

To continue to develop the process we are tackling the issues raised, and this will include giving better support to providers and training commissioners.

6.  Who’s responsible?

This work is being carried out by the Commissioning Group of the Leicester Partnership; which is led by Julie Morley from the City Council. The voluntary sector has been involved throughout , and the Commissioning Group includes representatives from Voluntary Action Leicester.

7.  Tips for providers

You can help to get ready for commissioning by talking to other providers about good practice or even to look at whether you could work up joint bids in future. Good joint bids are often very likely to be successful as they can often result in good joined up value for more provision.

Make sure you are up to date with innovative practice, and have relevant systems in place such as quality assurance, compliance with legislative requirements.

Voluntary Action Leicester also provides support, training and mentoring for those interested in commissioning and tendering, including exploring consortia and joint bidding. For further details contact June and Natasha as above.

8.  Your feedback

This approach represents a major but necessary change of direction for all of the organisations involved. We recognise the difficulties this has presented, and are doing everything we can to make it as effective as possible for all concerned.

We want to make sure that help ensure that we learn as we go along – and so welcome feedback and constructive comments from everyone involved – so do get in touch if your comments and experiences can help to develop the process in the light of experience.

9.  Further information

The commissioning framework and annual timetable are shown below. You can also download an example of a Pre Qualification Questionnaire (PQQ) at the bottom of this page.

This questionnaire is used from step six in the process below to see whether or not an organisation is ready to be invited to tender to provide services. It's useful reading if you want to think about what you need to do to make your organistion 'commission-ready'.

10.  Who can give support and advice?

Voluntary Action LeicesterShire (VAL)

Support from VAL’s Group Support Team can be accessed via the VAL Helpline on 0116 257 5050 or helpline@valonline.org.uk

The VAL Training Programme includes courses around commissioning and procurement / bidding for contracts.  To download the brochure and book places go to http://www.valonline.org.uk/training-groups

Download guides & policy templates are available from VAL’s Online Resource Centre at http://www.valonline.org.uk/orc
 
VAL also circulates information on tendering opportunities via an electronic mailing list (please contact June Gomes june.g@valonline.org.uk to subscribe).

Future commissioning activities will be publicised on this website. You can contact:

June Gomes

Voluntary Action Leicester (VAL)

0116 257 5037/0116 257 5051

june.g@valonline.org.uk

For further information visit VAL’s website www.valonline.org.uk.  VAL also circulates information on tendering opportunities via an electronic mailing list (please contact June Gomes to subscribe).

Or Contact

One Leicester Partnership Team

Tel: 0116 252 6371

ANNUAL COMMISSIONING TIMETABLE

Notes

⁽¹⁾  The dates given are based are a typical commissioning cycle, and based on when funding announcements are expected from Central Government. There may be delays in anticipated dates for some steps of the process if Central Government delays its decision making.

Due to delays in funding announcements and sign off of Leicester’s Local Area Agreement the Working Neighbourhoods Fund is approximately three months behind schedule in the above timetable.  Steps 1, 2 and 3 are currently happening and it is anticipated that Step 4 will commence around June/July. 

Strategic Commissioning is a cycle of activity.  Many of the steps within this process are continuous and in particular steps 1,2, 9 and 10 will be ongoing.