Submission from The Chartered institute of Purchasing and Supply (CIPS) (85)

I am writing to you on behalf of The Chartered institute of Purchasing and Supply (CIPS), the leading professional body for procurement with a global procurement community of over 100,000 in 150 countries.  We would like to offer our comments on a response on your website, submitted to the Communities and Local Government Select Committee by Mr Colin Cram. (http://data.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/WrittenEvidence.svc/EvidenceHtml/3838)

CIPS believes that aggregating spend to centralised, specialist procurement hubs will leverage spending power and cut costs, but also will be a mechanism for attracting top procurement talent into the public sector. 

Standardisation of goods and services across the public sector will help to drive out cost and complexity within the supply chain.  Through increased collaboration, local government will have the necessary support to manage contracts more effectively and reduce the risk of poor performing suppliers being used elsewhere.  Having a clear overview of key spend areas will allow procurement professionals to identify areas of duplication and help drive efficiencies.

This opportunity will also create critical mass and be a more attractive proposition for procurement professionals to map out a career development plan.  By creating central hubs procurement people with spend specialisms will be able to utilise their skill sets more frequently and build on their knowledge and expertise.  In the current devolved model specialisms are still required but used more infrequently so are difficult to recruit for and are underutilised.  The capability is not always available locally so working collaboratively will increase both skills and knowledge resulting in 'centres of excellence'.  Skills, knowledge and professionalism are key to success for this model and CIPS would advocate that professionally qualified, highly trained procurement staff are recruited into these roles.

We hope you find our comments useful, please do not hesitate to get in touch if you would like to discuss further.

January 2014

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