Friday 29 June 2012

Commissioning & Contracting

A quieter week by my standards, dominated by some mediation/facilitation work I undertook at the request of Surrey County Council between it and a member organisation over a long standing and difficult issue. The session went well for all parties, and I hope that the matter can now be resolved finally.

The other dominant issue this week has been the County Council’s process for commissioning infrastructure support services about which there is much public and private maneuvering. There was a session yesterday for potential bidders from within Surrey, but not open to external companies like Capita, Serco, which was a bit strange. This might be a Part B tender for the £0.5 mill services that previously were supplied on a grant basis by Surrey Community Action (SCA) and the district/borough CVS and others.  My guess is that SCC will not go to open tender, but invite competitive grant bids from the SVAN network (minus SCA) and from a partnership of county level bodies, including us, and with SCA as the lead body. There will be grief, but this is probably unavoidable if performance is to be raised.

Interesting to see the evaluation of Surrey CC’s  re-organisation of its Services for Young People and its commissioning/contracting process.

I have nearly finalised our own grant bid for Surrey Youth Enterprise, and am now working, quickly, on the MoD Community Grants bid due in by 9 July on behalf of our uniformed organisations.

Unfortunately, my meeting with the Bishop of Southwark’s Public Policy Adviser has been postponed from today – the Diocese being members of ours. One of the issues we were intending to discuss is the place of the church in what is called “the public square”- ie public discourse (press ,tv, social media, books etc) and the extent to which the Big Society is still alive as a concept, or whether it has been exposed as a fig leaf for cuts. Which takes me straight on to the ethics of banking…and beyond the scope of my work for SYF!

I got the prediction of an England v. Italy penalty shoot out right, but the wrong team won. I hope Italy win the final now – Sunday evening.. and Wimbledon!

Mike

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