National Advisory Group (NAG) Terms of Reference

Background and governance

The Local Government Association is the national voice of local government. We work with councils to support, promote and improve local government.

Councils have long recognised the importance that strategic procurement (our definition of strategic procurement includes procurement’s role in ‘commissioning’, ‘collaboration with the wider public sector’ and ‘contract management’) can play in delivering efficiencies and procurement contributing to reshaping and transforming service delivery as well as ensuring value for money and the potential impact on local, regional and national businesses and jobs.  Local authorities have been subject to massive reductions in funding and unavoidable growth pressures on the resources it has available to deliver services to our communities.

NAG will report on a quarterly basis to the Improvement and Innovation Board of the LGA and to our Chief Executive sponsor, Dr Martin Reeves of Coventry City Council and the West Midlands Combined Authority.

Role, remit and membership

LGA convene this group of senior local government procurement professionals, with at least one representative per English region.  We will work with our partners on the SOPO executive committee as one cohesive voice in order to:

• and share good practice to maximise the benefits of good procurement, as well as communicate and support local government colleagues to adopt any good practice identified;
• the role of procurement in supporting wider policies, improvements, added social value and efficiency savings for the sector
• blockers to efficient and collaborative procurement and how these might be resolved;
• account of procurement’s role in relation to other groups and bodies such as clinical commissioners, and new initiatives such as commercialism, devolution and combined authorities;
• influence and improve access to procurement related training to local government

NAG will provide leadership on issues relating to local government procurement through the issue, update and refresh of a National Procurement Strategy and providing one cohesive voice in particular on the following workstreams:

Leadership through lobbying on policy, influencing stakeholders and engaging with suppliers and our professional buying organisations.

• Making Savings, through projects relating to

       Category management
       Contract management
       Strategic supplier management
       Supporting commercial development  and income generation 

•  Supporting local economies through projects relating to

        Social value

• Modernising procurement through projects relating to

         Skills

• Innovation