Collaborate: Sustaining Diversity through Collaborative Tendering Executive Summary
Collaborate 1: HACT’s Supporting People collaborative tendering project
The policy and funding environment in which support services are delivered to vulnerable people is changing.
The new government has stated that it wishes to see voluntary groups play an increasing role in the delivery of services for vulnerable people. And it is likely to further devolve policy and funding decisions to local level.
The focus on community-based action as a way of delivering the vision of The Big Society, comes at a time when community-based voluntary organisations face threats from both severe cuts in public expenditure and trends in commissioning and procurement practice which jeopardise their ability to respond and – in some cases – to survive.
Increasingly, contracts have been bundled up and redistributed to a relatively small number of large providers.
HACT’s Collaborate 1 project set out to test whether smaller providers could maintain a place in the Supporting People market by developing collaborative approaches to tendering.
It was funded by Communities and Local Government (CLG), and delivered in partnership with Sitra and the National Housing Federation (NHF) during 2008/9. It resulted in a practice-based Collaborate Resource Kit published in 2009 and republished in 2010 due to its popularity.
Collaborate 1 showed that collaborative tendering can be a way for smaller organisations to survive and even thrive, but for this to happen requires:
- capacity within organisations to put time into the process of collaboration, and to see it as a strategic priority;
- availability of suitable partners;
- commissioning teams adopting an “intelligent commissioning” approach and being in charge of the procurement process, with procurement teams playing a technical support role.
The findings of this executive summary are thus of profound relevance to the way in which the new thinking on meeting the needs of vulnerable people plays out in reality.
It identifies actions to support the continuance of a diverse range of service options for vulnerable people needing housing related support.