The simple answer is, I think, that GOOD commissioners will see this new Act as an enabling mechanism to be creative: using co-production, creating new delivery vehicles, building in social requirements. We've been after it for many years. BAD commissioners (or those 'old skool' procurement-wallahs) will see it variously as a nuisance, a huge risk, another few entries to write on a procurement report, and/or something that doesn't apply to their service area.
If you read Cllr. Steve Reed's (Leader of Lambeth Council) article in the New Statesman this week -
www.newstatesman.com/blogs/politics/2012...eart-labours-renewal - you'll see that he talks not about doing MORE for less but doing DIFFERENTLY for less. Good commissioners will already being doing things differently and be chomping at the bit to be even
more radical. Bad commissioners will be recoiling in horror that their 17-layer risk-avoidant procurement procedures will be thrown into disarray, and be terrified that they will face challenges from unsuccessful bidders. Ideas like cooperative councils send process-driven bureaucrats into a frenzy of risk-averse panic.
The
real challenge in implementing this Act is not to let the mediocre people [continue to]) dictate the agenda but to let the creative people lead the way. The job of the procurement people should be to figure out
how it can be done, not to tell us it
can't be done...