Friday 17 November 2023 – Do Your Best

In The Little Things, the Assistant Director of Economic Development took it upon himself to explain to me why re-commissioning Social Value Portal would be a good thing for the council’s delivery of its Social Value policy.  Unable to address my point that the Portal doesn’t work, and we already know that because we have been using it for three years already, he, a bit desperately, invited the Head of Strategy into the conversation.  The HoS calmly explained to me that, “…there is something about the cultural point and the fact that it matters whether the contract owners own social value, probably in a way that they haven’t been because they haven’t been leant on to do that, and that’s no fault of yours Paul; it is an organisational point around the importance that has or hasn’t been attached to it that needs to shift.”

Too right!  I tried to make the point to him and the AD that, although I agreed a cultural shift to council officers taking ownership of delivering social value is needed (although why they just can’t be told to do the job they have been employed to do, I don’t know; it’s not complicated), how that cultural shift can be helped along by commissioning a monitoring portal that doesn’t work the AD dodged by saying any part of the Portal that doesn’t currently work is just an exception and can be fixed.

The HoS went on to explain to me that, “I got the sense from [the AD for Corporate Procurement] we were making some progress towards making that happen…”  My response was, Corporate Procurement has got nothing to do with monitoring social value, so how would she know or care that progress is being made?  (As an aside, into month 3 of their experiment, the Social Value Portal (SVP) hasn’t changed one iota.)  The assumption here is that Corporate Procurement is using SVP to assess bids such that the social value element of bids are submitted through SVP and the winning bid is then on the Portal ready to be monitored by SVP when the contract is awarded.  Otherwise, there is no mechanism to put proposed social value measures on the Portal to be monitored by SVP if that proposal was submitted directly to, and assessed by, the council.  Suffice to say, not only would the AD for Corporate Procurement not know what progress, if any, is being made to make SVP work in terms of monitoring because Corporate Procurement has never had anything to do with monitoring social value, Corporate Procurement is not using SVP to assess bids, so contracts never go on SVP to be monitored by them in the first place; corporately, we are not using SVP for procurement and, therefore, can’t use it for monitoring.

Seemingly designed to disprove the Head of Strategy’s point and prove mine, a Parks Project Officer emailed me a contract award report for Kabaku General Services to repair and refurbish the 1km of riverside railings in Bishops Park.  He attached Kabaku’s social value proposal for me to comment on including the numbers of different measures proposed plus a delivery plan for those measures.  The quantitative proposal included one long-term unemployed resident recruited to the team to repair and refurbish the railings along with six weeks of accredited training, but only one of those weeks for the unemployed resident hired, two apprenticeships created on the project for local residents; one being one week long and the other two weeks, and £10 of the £388,850 cost to the council for the works to be spent with local suppliers.

My initial thoughts for my comments were that I suspected that, rather than make a proposal, Kabaku opened up the spreadsheet into which they propose numbers of which measures they choose to deliver, mashed their hand on the keyboard and then hit the save button.  But, before I entered my comments on the report to be published, I remembered that they had also submitted a delivery plan for these measures.  Curious to know what a one-week apprenticeship is and whether they had already identified a local supplier with which to spend their budget allocation of £10, I thought I would read it before making a decision on my comments.  Two pages long, it talked at length about things that didn’t relate to their quantitative proposal, highlights including offering to renovate 8^th Hendon’s scout hut in Mill Hill East (Mill Hill East is smack in the middle of the London Borough of Barnet) and contributing “to achieving Barnet’s net zero carbon footprint [target] by 2030…”  It does also commit “during any building works [to] always use local suppliers”, but failed to expand on which local supplier or suppliers would be the beneficiary of the £10, and prioritising hiring workers from the local community, presumably Barnet’s, but no mention of training, including one-week apprenticeships that don’t exist.  I assume Kabaku submitted the wrong delivery plan proposal or else decided to submit one they did for Barnet Council because they thought no-one in Hammersmith & Fulham Council would notice.  They were mostly right until it got sent to me.

I replied to the Parks Officer asking, “Did Social Value Portal assess the social value proposal…?”

He replied,

“Hello Paul,

“We didn’t use the Social Value Portal as recommended from [L]egal and [Corporate P]rocurement…  It has been reviewed by Procurement who thought it was a good bid…”

“Thanks,

“[Parks Project Officer]”

 

I replied to him giving him my theory, not specifically meaning to criticise Corporate Procurement’s ability to assess a bid in a procurement exercise, that not only was the bid not “good” but was the wrong bid for the wrong contract for the wrong borough.  He replied simply, “I will go back to the supplier and ask that they review their SV submission…”

“The fingers you have used to dial are too fat.  To obtain a special dialling wand, please mash the keypad with your palm now.”  This is probably what happened to Kabaku when they entered the quantities of their Social Value proposal.  Corporate Procurement thought it was good, though.

I think it is great that this building company proposed to renovate a local scout hut (except that this proposal was supposed to go to Barnet Council).  I was in the Cub Scouts and we learned some useful life lessons such as “do your best”.  Perhaps if we had social value when the AD for Corporate Procurement was a child then perhaps she too would have learned this lesson for when she came to work in a senior public office and wouldn’t end up doing a mind-bendingly lacksadaisical job of spending large quantities of public money.  Why the Head of Strategy has such faith in her in shifting the culture around its social value policy within the council, I can’t tell, nor why using SVP is going to aid this transition when Corporate Procurement is not using it in the first place.  Just because the AD for Economic Development doesn’t want to take responsibility for Social Value delivery doesn’t mean someone else is going to do it for him no matter hard his obsequious Head of Strategy squirms to justify his approach.

A scout dyb dyb dobbing Akela, imbuing the importance of doing your best, a culture long lost on council corporate officers.