“Use council’s purchasing power to better support local business” say Greens.

Councils from Preston to Islington are spending locally through procurement, boosting local business and increasing the council’s take in business rates. It’s part of a concept called community wealth building. The Green Party believes there’s more opportunity for this in Havering, says Mark Whiley, Chair of Havering Green Party.

Starting my career at the Yellow Pages, I know that there are lots of sole traders and small businesses in Havering. We are a borough of builders, grounds maintenance firms, cleaners, dry cleaners and more besides. Some of my family fit into this category, and I ran a website consultancy as a side hustle in my youth.

This strategy isn’t new. It’s born out of successful projects in Cleveland, Ohio and Preston City Council in Lancashire. It isn’t just about buying goods and services from local businesses, it’s about how we direct expenditure from anchoring institutions like the council, local healthcare and education providers, organisations with big budgets, to the community as a whole – growing the economy and investing in local people.

How this is done:

1. Make tendering applications easier for local firms by removing complex jargon, breaking down larger contracts into smaller ones, having less requirements that exclude local firms.
2. Proactively support local firms to make bids, by having a direct contact at the council and by having events that highlight upcoming opportunities to potential contractors.
3. Update social value criteria to the procurement process, so that firms that are based in the community or give back to it are ranked higher.
4. Encourage local supply chains, especially important for when national firms are the better option overall and in negotiation with current contractors.
5. Building this local procurement strategy among healthcare, education and housing providers, external to the council.

Some contracts are tendered to local businesses already, which is great, but there’s no culture of this driven throughout the council. Instead, we are in a cycle of cutting services, raising taxes and asking the government to borrow. Generating more business rates income through aiding local businesses is a win-win for them and our financial situation.

We would later like to see training and development of the borough’s people as part of this approach, the creative economy, how the resources we have can be reused as part of a circular economy and circular waste strategy. Community cooperatives could bring together local people and their resources to fulfil a need in the borough, such as local food bought in bulk – I have experience in this as a former shareholder in a food cooperative.

This is about maximising the resources of the borough effectively so that we build wealth inside the borough and keep it here, rather than money being extracted from our area to be creating jobs for a multinational company elsewhere.

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