Agenda item

This report seeks approval to award a replacement contract for the supply of temporary workers to enable the delivery of council services.

RESOLVED: To: Approve the award of a four-year contract called off from the ESPO Mstar3 Framework London Collaboration Lot 1b for the Temporary Workers Staffing contract to Adecco Plc for a maximum contract value of £100m

Cabinet considered a report, which recommend that the Council award a replacement contract for the supply of temporary workers to enable the delivery of Council services.  It was reported that having a managed service provision for an area of high spend within the Council provided economies of scale and avoided ad-hoc and therefore potentially more expensive recruitment processes.

In addition, it was noted that expert market knowledge could source temporary staff with appropriate skills and on-board those staff using a standard recruitment process that was cost effective.

The recruitment of a skilled workforce was essential for the Council to deliver its services, however, the recruitment market was challenging and required specialist skills to attract talented staff, and to do this in a timely manner to avoid service delivery being impacted.

The Executive Mayor introduced the report and said that it comprised both Part A and Part B, the latter of which, set out the maximum approved cost of the contract and given that the information contained therein was commercially sensitive, it had not been published.  He reminded Members that if there were any questions to be put in respect of the Part B report then he would move to exclude the press and public for the duration of that item.

Councillor Cummings said that this was an important contract for the Council and there were multiple situations where agency staff could be required to be used and having a professional, easy to use, easy to monitor contract, helped significantly, both in terms of budget management and also in securing adequate resources in a timely manner.

Councillor Cummings said that agency staffing was not an additional spend but, rather it was managed from within existing staffing budgets within departments. He said that should agency staffing be forecast to have an impact on budgets, then this would require accrual, as would any other cost leverage. 

Councillor Cummings said that the report also detailed alternative options considered and why these were not recommended. 

Councillor King said that opposition Councillors were challenging the decision to put the “up to” value of the contract into the Part B papers since they fully accepted why a priced bid from an individual company in relation to a contract, was commercially sensitive.  He said that opposition Members felt that the “up to” value was not commercially prejudicial to the proposed contractor in letting Croydon’s residents know the maximum value of the contract, especially given it was a significant award.

Councillor King asked how specifically had he (the Executive Mayor, as decision-maker) satisfied himself that by directly awarding the contract to a sole supplier on a framework that had expired and without securing bids or proposals from any other qualified provider?

In response to the “up to value” question, the Council’s Monitoring Officer said that identity of the supplier and also the value of the award should have appeared in Part B rather than Part A.  He said that officers did not want to be put in a position whereby they were being seen to be putting in information in the public domain, which actually said to the market that a decision had been made in this matter.  He said that, in any event, the final decision rested with the Executive Mayor, but it was also important to have in mind, that once his decision had been made, it would be subject to due process in that the decision would be published and would be in the public domain.

The Executive Mayor, at this point said that when he considered the number of decisions he had to make since coming into office, which had been left over from the previous Administration, contracts worth lots of money had not had due process, had not been considered by Cabinet Members and had been left without any consideration, to now start querying an individual contract was, he said, quite remarkable.  He said that the number of contracts that had not been signed by the previous Administration in the run up to the last election, and the matters that he and Councillor Cummings had had to deal with on the contract management side post-election, he queried why this particular contract would be questioned.

The Council has undertaken an extensive market engagement and benchmarked utilising data from other Councils to deliver a value driven recommendation for an award of a new contract.

The Executive Mayor, in Cabinet, RESOLVED that the award of a four-year contract called off from the ESPO Mstar3 Framework London Collaboration Lot1 Temporary Workers Staffing to Adecco Plc for a maximum contract value of £100m.