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Introduction
1. Wales Council for Voluntary Action (WCVA) is a registered charity and umbrella body working to support, develop and represent Wales’ third sector at UK and national level. We have over 3,350 organisations in direct membership, and are in touch with many more organisations through a wide range of national and local networks. WCVA’s mission is to provide excellent support, leadership and an influential voice for the third sector and volunteering in Wales.
2. WCVA is committed to a strong and active third sector building resilient, cohesive and inclusive communities, giving people a stake in their future through their own actions and services, creating a strong, healthy and fair society and demonstrating the value of volunteering and community engagement.
Engagement with the third sector and WCVA’s written evidence
General comments
What changes, if any, have your members noticed when seeking to provide goods/services to the public sector in Wales since 2012?
8. Members reported the increased use of Sell2Wales as a useful means of advertising tenders.
9. There has also been a helpful shift towards the use of online portals for tendering, meaning that there is less need for paper copies to be printed off and it relieves some of the pressure to have the bid ready days in advance to allow time for postage. However not all purchasing authorities have embraced this system and some still require documents in triplicate and the full tender on CD Rom.
10.Others reported more support available for learning about tendering and procurement, especially for SMEs.
Your view of the strengths / weaknesses of Welsh Government procurement policy. Have any initiatives been particularly helpful / unhelpful?
13.The consensus on Community Benefits among third sector organisations seems to be that the policy is welcome, but they are often not scored or looked at as part of the tender (i.e. ‘core’) but just remain part of the contractual obligations (‘non-core’). This means it does not actually benefit organisations that may need to cost their services higher but give more back to the community. The only way that it would be a meaningful addition is to add it to scoring criteria either at a high level, or as a highly scored question within the quality section.
14.Community Benefits could also be extended to different types of contracts, and (proportionately) to lower value contracts. Different types of Community Benefits could also be explored.
15.Moves towards standardising Pre-Qualification Questionnaires (PQQs) across Wales through SQuID (Supplier Qualification Information Database) are also welcome. But the fact that different purchasing authorities use different procurement portals means that the information has to be regularly re-submitted in different formats anyway.
16.Some third sector organisations report that they are starting to see examples of joint commissioning (e.g. across social care and health).
17.There has been a shift towards larger, regional and more generic contracts. While some organisations are well-placed to respond to these opportunities, many smaller third sector organisations are effectively excluded from bidding alone. The Joint bidding guide has been an extremely useful tool in supporting organisations to form consortia and bid jointly for contracts.
What are the main barriers your members experience when looking to provide goods and services to the public sector in Wales?
22.Many organisations report that TUPE is by far the most problematic issue. These have been collated in the Appendix to this paper. Some third sector organisations have had to invest in dedicated TUPE training for their staff, but this is not an option for many organisations.
23.Increasingly, organisations report that they are experiencing long delays in getting clarification questions answered, which stops them being able to move forward with their bids. Often, questions will be in relation to financial, contractual or TUPE arrangements that will affect whether the bid is financially viable and need answering up front, to save organisations from writing a tender and then finding out they can’t afford to bid for it.
24.There have been recent examples of a Local Authority agreeing to having questions submitted to them up to the morning that the tender is due to be submitted, meaning that an answer that could affect the whole bid could be published at the 11th hour, not leaving bidding providers time to make appropriate changes to their bid.
25.Often, the turnaround time for tender submissions is also very tight: organisations report 3 weeks bidding time, with insufficient information provided at the outset, or even with mistakes in the tender documents.
26.This is particularly acute when organisations are considering joint bids for services. It takes time to develop a competitive joint bid, and if the rhetoric of ‘we welcome bids from consortia’ (often seen in contract notices) is to be realised, then a Prior Information Notice (PIN) a few months before the tender is released and a longer timescale would be necessary.
27.Organisations also report disproportionate PQQ requirements. Much more of the PQQ, for example requests to see policies and procedures, could be moved to more of a ‘tick box’ or self-certification exercise. Then, if successful at winning the tender, the provider could be asked to make copies available to the commissioner. This would save a lot of time and resource.
28. Sometimes tenders are advertised during peak holiday periods when no staff are available in Local Authority offices to respond to questions about the tender.
How successful have Welsh Government initiatives to increase the proportion of third sector organisations winning contracts been? How could these efforts be improved?
30.Greater visibility of contract opportunities (through Sell2Wales) is a welcome step.
31.Achieving more consistency and standardisation of tender approach would be beneficial, e.g. standardising timeframes that tenders are turned around in and standardising deadlines for answering questions on the portal.
32.There needs to be more of a focus on Community Benefits and more encouragement and dedicated facilitation of joint bids. The community benefits focus is especially important in helping more social business to gain contracts – at the moment this is very difficult and will remain so unless there is an obligation on commissioners to take community benefits into account/have a certain amount of the work undertaken by social business.
33. Overall, Welsh Government initiatives have been helpful in intention, and in some cases, in practice, but without any form of enforcement however, they have had little further practical impact.
Gareth Coles
WCVA
Tel: 02920 431 771
E mail: gcoles@wcva.org.uk
Appendix – Issues with TUPE
There are some of the issues reported about TUPE being a problem when tendering for contracts.