Agenda item

Purpose

The purpose of the report is to provide evidence to allow the committee to evaluate the extent that Portsmouth City Council is producing contracts for goods, works and services in a legally compliant value for money basis.

Recommendation

RECOMMENDED that the Governance & Audit & Standards Committee notes the report.

(TAKE IN REPORT)

Richard Lock, Assistant Director, Procurement, introduced the report which provided evidence to allow the committee to evaluate the extent that Portsmouth City Council was producing contracts for goods, works and services in a legally compliant value for money basis.

He advised the committee that the spend compliance information provided a full quarter of spend data and an analysis of spend across all systems rather than just spend via Oracle FUSION.  Spend compliance was strong at 99% for contracts through FUSION.

In respect of waivers, the report now included information on contracts which had been subject to previous cumulative waiver approvals, which when assessed in totality exceed £100k.  This was opposed to individual waiver instances which individually exceed £100k as had been previously reported.  He advised the committee that there were no high risk waivers.

To conclude, he explained that the previous Key Performance Indicator (KPI) monitoring system had been disbanded due to it no longer being fit for purpose.  A new, simpler, KPI monitoring system was being piloted on 72 contracts which included the council's highest value strategic contracts and medium value works call off contracts let via the council's £100M Primary Contractor Framework.

Following the successful piloting of the model it would be rolled out with the target of being applied to 80% of the contracts by contract value by the end of the 2023/24 financial year.

In reply to a concern raised by the committee, the Assistant Director (Procurement) offered assurance that the transaction above £100k in respect of Portsmouth International Port which could not be traced to a contract entry could be traced to a fully compliant procurement process. Risk was therefore considered to be low.

The committee raised further concerns in respect of the amount of non-compliant spend across services detailed within the report and the £2,265,236.24 which had been miscoded to Corporate Services.  The Assistant Director undertook to raise the latter point with Finance to confirm whether the spend had been miscoded.  From the transactions made it would appear that the spend related to regeneration, however there may have been reasons as to why the spend had been coded in this way.

In respect of the non compliant spend relating to adult services, the committee was advised that the spend might have legally compliant contracts in place, but not necessarily input onto the Intend procurement database.  Procurement were looking at these spends to input onto Intend and check governance arrangements as appropriate.

The committee congratulated the Procurement Service on the changes made which seemed to be realising improvements.

RESOLVED that the committee NOTED the update report.