Decision details

RESOLVED:

That the Cabinet Procurement and Insourcing Committee:

Agreed to approve the award of a 4-year contract, via the Crown Commercial Services framework RM6017 for Postal Goods, Services and Solutions (Lot 7: Hybrid Mail, Digital And Transformational Communications) to ‘Supplier A’ for the estimated contract value of up to £3.5M.

REASONS FOR DECISION/OPTIONS APPRAISAL

The Council continues to have a requirement for these additional specialist print services and with the current contract having expired in March 2020, there is a need to reprocure via an appropriate framework. This contract will be a call off contract that enables a wide range of council services to use the contract when needed and when appropriate. The contract award does not commit the council to any spend for printing, notwithstanding any potential set up costs that could be charged by a new supplier as part of their commercial bid.

These specialist print services form part of our overall communications with residents In recent years alternative avenues of communicating with residents have been explored and introduced, for example we are also making use of Gov.Notify built into new digital services to send bulk emails/SMS messages and letters to residents. The proposed future approach is to continue to use an effective mix of our in-house print, the Gov.Notify service and the external variable data print contract which is detailed in this paper to meet the Council's varied written communication needs with the residents and local businesses.

This report therefore seeks authorisation to award this contract, which does not guarantee specific volumes of work to the supplier, in order to enable the Council’s services to competitively meet increases in demand for variable print services and support the communications strategies of the Council and its departments in a way that is also aligned to the Council’s sustainability values ands meet the high standards of performance required by the Council.

In arriving at this recommendation the following options were considered: (a) do nothing, (b) in-source service provision, (c) call-off services from existing framework agreements.

Do nothing: This option is not available to the Council as there is an ongoing  requirement for the service which we cannot meet in house and the existing contract has expired. Doing nothing places an ongoing risk to the Council and the areas who require this work as there is no formal contract in place.

Insourcing: Providing the Service in-House is not cost effective due to the costs of investment needed into the Print Unit for the required specialist equipment and personnel, to be able to provide the range of services needed. It is also anticipated that the need for these services will reduce over the life of the contract (as described above in a strategic context) and therefore investment in specialist equipment would bring diminishing returns.

The preferred option is to proceed via a further competition to be undertaken via the Crown Commercial services frameworks RM6017 for Postal Goods, Services and Solutions (Lot 7: Hybrid Mail, Digital And Transformational Communications).

The preferred option ensures the Council can gain best value through the competitive pricing offered via CCS as well as being in line with Council requirements, in a call off contract that enables services to use this service when needed, whilst allowing us to transform the services to residents in line with changing user needs and behaviours.