Chamber and committees

If there was specific guidance from the Scottish Government that provided a definition of fair trade within procurement and, each year, as part of your annual report, you had to publish the level of fair trade spend based on that definition, could you do that with a change in the way in which you monitor it?

Stephen, I imagine that building that for dozens of individual colleges and universities would be quite a challenge for you. I am keen to hear how colleges and universities monitor that across the board. I am also intrigued by something that you said about the tension between best value and other requirements of the 2014 act. In your submission, you say:

“Potentially the requirement to consider wider policy issues is also leading to the stifling of best value and innovation. Contracting Authorities can be so focussed on including all aspects of policy (fair work, environment etc) that it becomes a box ticking exercise and dissuades smaller companies from bidding.”

I am keen for you to expand on the challenges around that tension.

Do you measure the value of that in your overall procurement?

That would be helpful—thank you.

For the Official Report, I can say that there were nods there: everybody agreed with that point.

On another area of procurement and fair trade, we heard evidence last week from the Scottish Fair Trade Forum. Scotland is a fair trade nation, South Lanarkshire and Aberdeenshire are Fairtrade zones, and Aberdeen city and the city of Edinburgh are Fairtrade cities. I suppose that, as part of your procurement strategy, you have to include a statement of general policy on fairly and ethically traded goods and services.

The Scottish Fair Trade Forum did a report a couple of years ago based on freedom of information requests to local authorities regarding spend on fair trade products. That was £2,644 for Aberdeen city for the 2021-22 financial year, £7,260 for Aberdeenshire, £3,756 for Edinburgh and £28,668 for South Lanarkshire—so South Lanarkshire was top of the table. However, I suspect that the level of spend on fair trade in each of your authorities is higher than that. Why are those figures not higher?

If you have a general policy commitment on fairly traded goods, how do you monitor it if you do not hold or publish that information in a usable way?

I wish to follow up on some of the points that have been raised. Local authorities have mentioned

“the challenges in monitoring and capturing this data in respect of sub-contractors and the wider supply chain”

once a contract has begun. They pointed out that,

“At contract evaluation stage, the evaluation panel will consider Fair Work First responses submitted by the principal contractor”,

but the council does not have the resources to follow that up through monitoring what actually happens with subcontractors.

I will start with you, Rob and Joe, as you spoke a wee bit about some relevant discussions. How do you monitor the delivery of fair work principles when you have a big capital project that might have gone to a contractor and that could be subcontracted in a whole range of ways? How do you know that the subcontractors are delivering on those principles?

Gordon, feel free to comment on how you monitor what happens beyond the main contractor. It is no secret that the NHS is facing huge financial challenges—my local health board has just announced that it has a £35 million deficit this year alone—and procurement must be one of the ways in which you are seeking to find savings in the health service. At the end of the day, price must be the absolute driver when it comes to delivery. To what extent are you using procurement to try to make the significant savings that you are having to make? What effect does that have on other issues such as fair work and the environment?

I turn to Gordon Beattie. The fact that there is a mixed bag in the NHS probably comes down to monitoring as much as anything else. People do not always measure the full range of fair trade goods that they buy. Is that a challenge for the health service? Are you even asked to do that at the moment?

David Livey is nodding. Is there anything else that we can change in the process to better embed fair work?