Our latest secret social entrepreneur blog is a tale of delays, incompetence - and missed lunches.
As the Public Services (Social Value) Act 2012 comes into force many social entrepreneurs will be hoping that a new climate for commissioning leads to more opportunities to deliver public contracts.
Based on my experiences running a small social enterprise, working with public sector agencies has its pros and cons. The big pro is the money. The big con is bureaucratic structures that seem impervious to desperate pleas for a sensible response or, in some cases, any response at all.
My favourite experience of local authority bureaucracy came a few years ago when a contract we'd been delivering successfully came up for renewal. Our contract was due to end in March so we approached the service manager responsible for commissioning it early in December.
She agreed that things were going well and said she planned to extend the contract on similar terms to the current one but with a few alterations. Those alterations were quickly agreed and all that remained was for the council's procurement team to draw up a new contract based on the agreed terms.
In March our contract ended but there was still no word from the procurement team. The service manager repeatedly assured us they'd have the new contract ready soon.
One member of our small staff was employed specifically to deliver the contract and several others of the team also worked on it for part of their time. Should we make one or more staff redundant? Should we, as our service manager initially hoped, just continue to do the work on the basis that we'd get the money eventually?
We did, for a few weeks before pointing out to the service manager that, as we needed to do other work in an attempt to cover our wage bill, we couldn't continue to deliver the contract unpaid in our spare time - particularly as some of us couldn't afford to buy lunch to keep us going through the day.
When the contract finally arrived, emailed by the procurement team boss in May, it consisted of the council's standard contractual terms, the service specifications we'd agreed with our manager the previous December and a single page of original material generated by the procurement team.
That page included the dates that contract would run for - which were out by a month - and the value of the contract, which was out by £54,000. I immediately contacted the head of the procurement team who confirmed that these were 'typos'. The first payment of the new contract, originally promised in April, finally arrived in July. My understanding landlords got their missing rent and I gradually reintroduced lunch into my diet.
Looking back I see the experience, which is nothing compared to what many other social entrepreneurs I know have gone through, as a primitive experiment in payment-by-results. Payment was available to our organisation if we could: (a) deliver the service the commissioner wanted and (b) keep going long enough for their bureaucracy to figure out how to pay us for delivering it.
Clearly there is no obvious solution to the problem of bureaucracies being inefficient. It's not realistic (or necessarily even desirable) to expect local authorities and other public sector agencies to pay social enterprises at the point social enterprises would like them to but it ought to possible to provide clear information about when contracts will be agreed and when payments will be made.
Equally, from the social enterprise point of view, we need to be - politely - firm and persistent in the way we engage with bureaucracies. We also need to prepare for the ever-present possibility that things might go wrong by not being overly dependent on a single income stream.
Furthermore, we must make commercial decisions, on a case-by-case basis, about whether the benefits of tendering for, and taking on, a public contract outweigh the associated costs.
Posted by
Secret Social Entrepreneur
.png)
