Procuring a Smile on Carol’s Face
In February 2018, Knowsley Council in the UK published a public procurement notice. In it, they introduced a 15-year-old girl, a single child in need of complex care support services. This tender stood from the hundreds of contract opportunities released by cities in the UK every week that are largely incomprehensible, written in the kind of bureaucratic English that is a short-hand among officials, lawyers and corporate service providers. This tender was written with love.
Let’s call her Carol for the purpose of this story. This tender read like the way a mother might describe her daughter in a letter to a loved one. It told us that Carol loves to play games, going to the park, doing crafts. She is afraid of sudden changes to her environment. We learn about her home and the health related circumstances cause her need for professional daytime care. It is evident that Knowsley wants to find a provider who would enjoy caring for Carol, why else share her details about her personality?
This, too, is public procurement. A highly personalized, human-centered way of finding the right professional to care for Carol.
This tender was released after a series of scandals in many cities in the UK where corporate care providers, very adept at navigating the complex procurement process, were charging excessive fees and provided very poor care services according to simplistic task lists. Like other cities, Knowsley had decided to open up it’s social care contracts to smaller providers and focus procurement on what mattered most: meeting Carol’s need for love, care and happiness.
Knowsley offers another dimension to the story of how procurement is a creative force I outlined in my recent report for the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. Reducing Carol to a technical specification, the prevailing practice in social care procurement by governments around the world, is as much a deliberate (creative!) choice as is Knowsley’s effort to humanize her. Overly technical specifications echo a time when procurement quite intentionally gave preference to corporate service providers. “You won’t get fired for hiring IBM” can be translated to just about every category of procurement. In most cities, this mindset was reinforced by decades of new public management reforms in the form of privatization, outsourcing and corporate specialization.
“I have learned that the real test of development can be measured not by the bureaucratic approval process but by the smile on a child’s face when a project is successful.” (James Wolfensohn, President of The World Bank, 1995)
Many city leaders trusted that competition in the market would inevitably lead to better outcomes. But mindsets began to change in the aftermath of the 2007/8 financial crisis, when cities around the world had to implement painful cuts in public services just as social care needs skyrocketed. It was in the process of implementing these painful cuts, foreshadowing the impact Covid-19 would have just a few years later, that many cities soon found themselves in legal battles over the inflexible ten- or even twenty-five-year contracts with powerful suppliers that had no vested interest in the community.
As cities looked around for alternatives, they saw the local suppliers, social entrepreneurs and community organizations that kept stepping up to fill the gaps. Cities began to rethink their partnerships, prioritizing suppliers that cared for community outcomes and offered more flexibility to respond to changing needs.
Humanizing procurement is just one of the many ways in which cities are achieving this transition.
For further reading, download my recent Report “Serving the Citizens, Not the Bureaucracy” for the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.
