Consultancy and Professional Services Procurement

The public sector’s use of consultants has grown in recent years.  In London, local authorities spent an estimated £320m on consultants in 2007/08.

Local authorities have a responsibility to ensure that this level of expenditure provides value for money. The public sector use of consultants has grown at an increasing rate over the past few years and has been subject to critical coverage by the media.

To meet the challenges of continued improvement in service delivery in a constantly shifting environment, it is likely that local authorities will need to continue to purchase professional services from external suppliers.

The Consultancy and Professional Services Procurement project offers a free suite of products designed to help authorities reduce spend and improve results from the purchase and use of consultants.

More information about the project's products and services can be found below.

Factors to be addressed

• understanding how much, what and which professional service providers an organisation uses and what the requirement will be in the future
• making a proper assessment of whether internal resources can be used instead of consultants
• collecting and sharing adequate and appropriate information on professional service providers to improve their buying and negotiating position and understand what value they bring
• actively engage with key professional service providers to understand how they and the market works and help suppliers better understand the local authorities' business and operational requirements
• build internal capacity by planning and carrying out transfer of skills from professional service providers to internal staff.

The Products are:

Commissioning toolkit for the procurement of consultancy and professional services Opens in a new window
(144pp, 1.7 MB)

Commisioning toolkit appendix Opens in a new window
(120pp, 470 Kb)

Consultancy commissioning toolkit appendix (Word format)
(120pp, 997 Kb)

The aim of the toolkit is to assist in raising awareness of the issues and activities that need to be addressed to realise efficiencies, value for money and better results from commissioning consultants. It also provides practical guidance and resources that will support the review of the approach, procurement process and management and evalution in commissioning consultants. This will support the delivery of an efficient and sucessful outcome. Follow the link above to download the Commissioning Toolkit. 

A Guide to Buying Consultancy Opens in a new window
(15pp, 221KB)

This guide supplements the Consultancy Commissioning Toolkit and provides pragmatic guidance that helps to focus on and specify what results need to be delivered.

Consultancy Brokerage Model Opens in a new window
(18pp, 226KB)

This provides local authorities with an approach to achieving better results and improved value from commissioning consultancy. The proposed approach is phased in its implementation with each stage building on the previous one.

Consultancy Knowledge Centre

This provides local authorities with the capability to share information and data on consultancy assignments that have been completed

Buying Consultancy Services Workshop Opens in a new window
(2pp, 59KB)

This provides training to develop the specific skills required to commission and manage successful consultancy assignments to achieve better results.