GETTING value for money is something councils are acutely conscious of, especially now with money in short supply and much greater public interest in, and awareness of, how taxpayers' money is spent.
As one of the country's larger authorities, contract procurement is inevitably big business at County Hall. An astonishing £850m is spent on contracting services and goods each year.
Which means companies will know there is potentially lucrative business to be had from KCC, which in turn benefits from such competition and can often use its size and economies of scale to get good deals on behalf of the taxpayer by being able to drive prices down.
However, as we report today, there is not always competition for some of these contracts. The county council has awarded at least £4.2m of business in the last two years without putting the business out to tender.
It has taken a while for KCC to provide us with these details - initially claiming that there was no central registry which recorded the occasions when contracts were awarded without tender and therefore it didn't hold the information we had sought.
(That was changed when we pointed out that the council's own rules stated that where this happened, the details should be recorded and filed.)
There are often good reasons why contracts are awarded without being put out to tender but as KCC itself says, they should be the exception rather than the rule.
What is particularly striking to me about the list is the number that were related to social care and health services, where councils are increasingly reliant on the independent sector. The issue here is that many of these are statutory requirements; if the council hadn't awarded a contract, it presumably would have been in breach of its legislative obligations to continue providing the service.
You can read our coverage of this in this latest Kent Messenger. And here is the full list of contracts and KCC's explanation:
KCC CONTRACTS.pdf (2.21 mb)
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I blogged recently about a curious FOI response from KCC.
As well as providing us with information about the costs of drawing up an environmental report into the proposed Operation Stack lorry park off the M20, it included a comment criticising our earlier press coverage of the issue.
It now appears the criticism was inserted at the behest of the county council leader Paul Carter.
In its response to a follow up query we made, the council has replied:
"Thank you for your email, we are very sorry for the delay in responding to your enquiry. The comments you refer to were included at the request of the Leader of the Council and were intended to reflect the Council's concerns that the public were not provided with an accurate reflection of the facts.
"As you will be aware there are no provisions within the FOI legislation that restrict the extent to which public bodies correspond with an applicant, as long as the requested information is provided, or an explanation is given for non disclosure, public bodies are free to engage as much as considered necessary. Although your request referred to financial information relating to the Operation Stack Proposals, our comments relate to those proposals and therefore are not considered to be out of context."
I wonder how this response sits with the principle that when it comes to dealing with reqests, FOI is supposedly motive blind? Why someone is making the request and who is making the request are not material considerations.
Still, it does show that interest in FOI goes right to the top at County Hall. Can't be a bad thing...
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