Written by Anthony Oliver
The English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill (2025) will streamline local government by replacing county councils, district councils, and some unitary authorities with a single tier. The aim is to drive efficiency, reduce duplication, accelerate decision-making, and unlock savings for front-line services. New unitary authorities will serve approximately 500,000 people, while Strategic Authorities will oversee around 1.5 million.
This reform comes as local authorities face significant budget and staffing pressures. Partnership working is well established, with councils adopting various collaborative models, such as shared services and joint leadership teams, to deliver savings and improve procurement.
Devolution will enhance value for money through consolidated procurement, enabling larger contracts and potentially favouring bigger suppliers. However, the Procurement Act 2023 removes barriers for SMEs and VCSEs, encouraging their participation in public contracts. SMEs should view larger, longer-term contracts as opportunities to scale and form joint ventures. Local authorities are increasingly committed to involving SMEs in procurement, and devolution may further expand these opportunities.
Authorities must leverage the Procurement Act 2023 to achieve better outcomes, using simplified bidding processes and flexible procedures. This will facilitate partnerships and increase social value -economic, social, and environmental – delivered through procurement.
Short-term market disruption is likely as services are consolidated and contracts reviewed. Some procurements may be delayed while future needs and models are determined. New authorities will need to address duplicated systems and processes, requiring procurement to adapt quickly.
However, it is crucial that procurement position themselves to take on the challenges that local government reorganisation will deliver. Key considerations to delivering effective procurement now and following the local government reorganisation are:
Strategy & Organisation
It is imperative to have a Procurement Strategy in place, backed by detailed short and medium-term execution plans, communication to, and bought in by all procurement staff. The Procurement Strategy plays an important part in, and should be tied to, overall corporate strategy with a strong focus on cost reduction and supply management including innovation, quality and revenue generation. Strategic and tactical activities should be clearly segregated with dedicated resources, who are commercially aware, employing sourcing strategies as part of category management.
Engagement & Functional Effectiveness
The Procurement organisation should be seen as a value-added partner and not just as a tender processing function, with a Procurement Director or equivalent reporting into the Finance Director (S151 Officer). Procurement resources must be involved with other functions of the authority at every stage of the procurement process, both assisting the development of the specification, addressing the unit cost of goods, services or works purchased as well as addressing demand. Key indirect spend should be leveraged across the organisation and managed centrally. Procurement must be integrated with stakeholder functions and influencing what is bought.
Strategic Sourcing
Sourcing activity should be a fact-driven approach underpinned by robust data and analytics. Processes should be embedded in the organisation, complying with the authorities Contract Procedure Rules whilst transparency should address the requirements of the Procurement Act 2023. Procurement should be involved in the specifying process with the aim to standardise certain purchases and make sure the specifications allow for reasonable competition. Procurement professionals must have an excellent understanding of the spend categories they manage, conducting effective market research and leveraging knowledge management for the use of data and past sourcing projects.
Category and Supplier Management
There must be a focus on supplier measurement with Procurement leading on the measurement and the KPI setting process. Supplier Management should be considered as a means on delivering value beyond the existing contract, considering innovation, quality and cost as part of a continuous improvement process. Long-term partnering arrangements should be sought with contacts designed to incentivise suppliers to reduce costs. For example, through sharing savings or margin protection, and to add further value. With major indirect activity outsourced to managed vendors, the authority must retain full cost visibility, with a strong measurement base and with suppliers incentivised to optimise the cost base.
Purchase to Pay
There should be standardised procedures for contracting and administration.
An effective electronic contracts repository should be in place, aligned with the authorities ERP systems and linked to buying channels. A Buying channel strategy which is clearly communicated should clearly define purchasing routes to market supported by appropriate solutions (e.g. e-Procurement solutions, P-Cards) which are fully integrated to enable seamless, automated end-to-end processing.
Officers of the council should be fully empowered to carry out transactional procurement on behalf of the business within the controls of the supporting eProcurement solution. With the need to move to a single ERP solution, there should be a focus on delivering a fully integrated purchase to pay process with a single platform for requisitioning and invoice exception handling, providing seamless processes for end-user officers.
People and Skills
Procurement should be viewed as a commercial function by the wider organisation.
Procurement professionals should be well educated and commercially astute with the required procurement skills clearly documented and communicated. Adoption of membership of the Chartered Institute of Procurement and Supply for most procurement professionals and formal training programmes should stress analytical, commercial and negotiation skills along with broader soft skills. The procurement organisation should be optimised to manage the balance of strategic vs tactical procurement activity using technology, outsourcing and upskilling of the team.
Measurement, Policies, Controls and Compliance
Policies should be communicated clearly to all staff and give reasonable guidance on what can or cannot be done. Compliance should normally be managed by the appropriate procurement processes and systems. Systems should be developed to measure procurement cost reductions which are shared with the wider organisation, with a clear process for translating sourcing cost reductions into budget reductions. There needs to be a clear set of performance metrics from cost savings (soft & hard) to operational efficiency, linked to the vision/mission of the procurement organisation, including with larger contracts, risk reduction and supplier relationship management.
Systems, Data and Metrics
Adoption of eSourcing functionality through a single “end to end” platform which manages both eTendering, eAuctions and eContracts Management.
All key supplier relationships should be managed online, tracking KPIs, SLAs and managing improvement projects. Contract Management should be integrated with end-to end eTendering / eProcurement tools enabling seamless upload of contract information and contract monitoring data. Data Analysis tools will be required to ensure data integrity before analysis. Data should be used to drive strategic sourcing efforts, manage supplier relationships and increase compliance with reporting fully integrated into business metrics and key benchmarking.
Consideration of these factors will assist in repositioning procurement into a leading edge, professional organisation to take on the challenges of local government reorganisation.
Anthony Oliver FCIPS is an experienced public‑sector procurement leader who has held senior roles including Director of Commercial Services at Herefordshire Council and Director of Commercial & Customer Services at Stoke‑on‑Trent City Council. He has led major procurement transformation programmes, category management initiatives, and operating‑model reforms across £1bn+ spend portfolios, bringing deep expertise in strategy, governance, social value, and sustainable supply chains.
