As the City of London Corporation’s Chairman of Projects and Procurement, I have been working with our Officer and Member teams to pull together a programme of transformation, to support the Corporation in its ambition to achieving value for money, be a partner of choice and be an industry leader in delivering social value.
The City Corporation currently procures around £700m of goods and services annually, with almost 1,200 third party contracts live, valued at £2.7bn. It also has around 300 projects live, valued at £2.5bn, delivering exciting infrastructure for London and beyond.
On project, programme and portfolio management (P3), the Court of Common Council approved our new policy earlier this year, which sets out a simplified data and governance framework, applies automation of the rules through our new workflow platform (Cora), and has created a central PMO aligned to industry sectors, with improved management accountability for effective risk management and delivery on time and within budget.
On procurement, we recognise that our current framework is inefficient. It has not yet taken full advantage of the changes in the Procurement Act 2023 and new Government’s refresh of the National Procurement Policy Statement and does not allow for commercial flexibility between the different roles the City Corporation has, i.e. local government v’s charity trustee v’s industry administrator v’s private investment management, etc.
To address this, the Project and Procurement Sub Committee have asked the Finance Committee to expand the commercial transformation capacity of the team to allow us to retire the Procurement Code and write a new Procurement Policy, with a robust assurance framework with streamlined governance. We will crease a new contract management model to support commercial maturity across the Corporation. We will map out process workflow and remove inefficiencies to allow for STP and automation, where possible and we will introduce a new commercial scorecard to improve visibility of procurement prioritisation and spend behaviours, to ensure we derive value for money front-to-back.
I am wholly aware that taking a traditionally risk adverse organisation which often aligns itself to local government to be safe, and trying to changing its corporate culture to better reflect best practice across successful business models in the the Square Mile will take time, but we have set our course and over the next couple of years we hope to see the fruits of our labour.
If you’re interested in joining us on that journey, do keep an eye on the City of London Corporation’s jobs website here.
