Buy North East

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Buy North East is a North East Chamber of Commerce campaign in collaboration with the Northern Echo to highlight the benefits better public procurement practices could bring to the North East economy. This successful campaign has been expanded to involve the private sector and encourage us all to Buy North East and to take a responsibility for supporting the local economy.

Background

Much work has been done in the North East in recent years to maximise the relationship between procurement and economic development. This includes the development of the LM3 model initially in Northumberland, workstreams being carried out by the North East Centre for Excellence, and the drafting of a high level agreement on procurement. However, the impact of this is yet to be felt by many North East businesses. Problems bidding for public contracts are repeatedly raised as a serious concern by NECC members at our network of sub-regional committees and regional council.

Campaign Themes

BROADER: Increasing awareness of the benefits of using the private sector to deliver goods and services SIMPLER: Reducing the complexity of the bidding process, including through harmonisation of documents SMARTER: Looking beyond the bottom line to use public procurement for economic, social and environmental benefits.

Aims

Aims of the campaign include:

• Increasing the number of North East councils that have signed the Small Business Friendly Concordat
• Public sector bodies writing aims and targets for procurement into broader economic strategies
• Greater adoption of LM3 - or RM3 - model.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is LM3? LM3 is a simple evaluation tool and stands for local multiplier 3. LM3 is a tool developed by the New Economics Foundation to identify how money circulates in the local economy. It is based on the premise that the problem is not necessarily that too little money flows into a neighbourhood. Rather it is what consumers, public services and businesses do with that money. Too often it is spent on services with no local presence and so immediately leaves the area. In the North East this model was first developed with Northumberland County Council. Northumberland County Council has used the LM3 model both to provide an objective measure of the impact of procurement spending on the community they exist to serve but also as a catalyst for change within the organization. By surveying £245m annual procurement spend they showed every pound spent by the council actually generated a total impact of £2.19 within the local area. However by developing the model the Council were also able to show that every pound spent locally actually contributed £2.76 to the economy, while money that was spent outside the area generated only £1.36. Because of this difference it is now possible to calculate what the impact on the community of a change in procurement spending will have.

What is the Small Business Friendly Concordat?

The Small Business Friendly Concordat is a voluntary, non-statutory code of practice. The concordat sets out the actions that local authorities will take to make their contracts more accessible to SMEs to encourage effective trade between local authorities and small businesses. The Department for communities and local government (DCLG), LGA and the Small Business Service (SBS) strongly encourage all Local Authorities (in England) to sign up to the Concordat. The National Procurement Strategy for Local Government (October 2003) identified this as a specific milestone and set a target for all Local Authorities to have adopted the Concordat by the end of 2005.