‘Common Themes on commissioning the VCS in selected Local Authorities in Greater London’

Executive Summary

The terms commissioning, procurement, and tendering are often used interchangeably to describe the purchase of services by public bodies from third party providers leading to confusion and poor understanding of the practice of commissioning;

Commissioning is defined for the purposes of this report, in line with the work of the Audit Commission, as

the process of specifying, securing and monitoring services to meet individuals' needs at a strategic level. This applies to all services, whether they are provided by the local authority or by the private or voluntary sectors;

Recent work by the Office of the Third Sector (OTS) provides details of the key principles on which effective commissioning with the VCS should be built including–

• the requirement to understand the needs and preferences of present and future users,
• the needs to map existing provision and identify service gaps,
• a strategic approach to identifying service needs,
• ongoing dialogue between commissioners and potential providers, and
• an evidence base to evaluate service performance;

The evidence collected by this study shows that work to these principles is extremely rare amongst existing commissioning practice.

The extensive emphasis placed on the importance of commissioning to the future of the delivery of public services is a relatively recent phenomena for local authorities and PCTs. Commissioning of the VCS across health and social care forms a minority of activity equating to just 14 per cent of the overall budget for service delivery by third parties in England .

When commissioned the majority of VCS organisations are very small, 84 per cent have incomes below £1million per annum, 34 per cent below £50k, and 54 per cent employ less than 25 people VCS engagement in commissioning is low, 70 per cent state they have not responded to any commissions for service delivery in the last year.

Those VCS agencies who do submit tenders are usually successful, 60 per cent of tenders submitted achieve success.