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Business Information for Local and Central Government FLOOD MANAGEMENT TRANSPORT

SUSTAINABLE TRANSPORT SYSTEMS

CREATING GREENER CITIES Can urban tree planting increase the strength of flood defences?

Highlighting the need for a more seamless and integrated local transport system

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Business Information for Local and Central Government FLOOD MANAGEMENT TRANSPORT

SUSTAINABLE TRANSPORT SYSTEMS

Comment

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CREATING GREENER CITIES Can urban tree planting increase the strength of flood defences?

Highlighting the need for a more seamless and integrated local transport system

PLUS: CIPD | DIGITAL | FACILITIES MANAGEMENT | SMART BUILDINGS

12-year low must ignite change for buses Department for Transport figures have highlighted that the crisis facing local transport has reached a pivotal point as the number of local bus journeys has fallen to a 12-year low. Across the country, transport deserts are expanding as bus services serving some communities disappear. That is according to the Campaign for Better Transport’s Darren Shirley, who writes on the current state of public transport on page 24. Demand for bus travel has not been this low since the beginning of 2006. Additionally, there has been a 55 per cent increase in fares alongside public funding for bus services having halved in the last eight years. There is no denying that falling passenger numbers are a direct result of cuts in funding. It is essential that the government use the upcoming budget to halt the trend of cutting support for buses. With a loss of transport, especially in rural areas, also increasing the likelihood of a loss of jobs and educational services, encouraging a more sustainable transport system must be the first step in addressing the problems we are facing as a nation and bring benefits to local communities across the country.

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It was also a relief to read at the start of the month that 10 local authorities are to take forward new measures to reduce pollution levels as part of the government’s plan to tackle and improve the UK’s poor air quality. By increasing bus use and cutting car use, our cities and towns should become cleaner places to live. Michael Lyons, editor

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226 High Rd, Loughton, Essex IG10 1ET. Tel: 020 8532 0055 Fax: 020 8532 0066 Web: www.psi-media.co.uk EDITOR Michael Lyons PRODUCTION EDITOR Dan Kanolik PRODUCTION DESIGN Sophia Mew PRODUCTION CONTROL Lucy Maynard WEB PRODUCTION Victoria Casey ADVERTISEMENT SALES Steve Day, Azad Miah, Bernie Miller, David Morgan ADVERTISEMENT SALES SUPERVISOR Neil Haydon PUBLISHER Karen Hopps ADMINISTRATION Isabelle Hayes REPRODUCTION & PRINT Argent Media

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Volume 25.5 | GOVERNMENT BUSINESS MAGAZINE

Contents

Contents Government Business 25.5 07 News

£1bn at risk of being sent back to EU; declining appetite for local outsourcing; and 12-year low for local bus journeys

15 Facilities management A key way to reduce energy bills and tackle climate change at the same time is to improve the efficiency of buildings in the UK. The Westminster Sustainable Business Forum’s Jim Clark explains why

19 Flood management Suzanne Simmons talks about flood risk management and how this can be achieved through the Trees for Cities’ urban tree planting and Edible Playgrounds programmes

Nick Ford discusses the barriers to digital transformation in public sector and explaining how Knowsley Council has overcome these

41 Smart buildings

The Smart Buildings Show aims to connect visitors to the latest information and technology in the smart buildings industry

45 Professional development

The biggest professional issues of our time and the new role of the people profession will be discussed at the 71st CIPD Annual Conference and Exhibition

46 Libraries

24 Transport 19

37 Digital

You hear library and you instantly think cuts and closures. But, as Ian Anstice explains, there are plenty of examples of where innovation and investment are making a difference

The Campaign for Better Transport’s Darren Shirley discusses the current state of public transport and how local communities can encourage sustainable transport in their regions

49 LuxLive

26 Road management

Artsm recognises the need to be at the forefront of the changes that are coming in the road management and safety

LuxLive 2018 is the unmissable event for anyone in the lighting industry. Government Business previews next month’s event

29 Public Sector Show

53 G-Cloud

Corby Ganesh discusses how the 2018 Public Sector Show is the ideal space for procurement professionals to network with suppliers and develop learning

sponsored by

The adoption of the cloud in the public sector has increased in the last few years, in no small part because of the government’s G-Cloud offering. Here we chronicle the 10th iteration of the agreement and address some of the key concerns aroud data

93 Frameworks

A look at some of the latest Crown Commercial Service framework agreements, including the recently opened Digital Outcomes and Specialists 3, as well as agreements covering management consultancy and supply teachers

29 37

Government Business magazine

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Transforming together one person at a time If you are engaged in transformation look us up on G-Cloud 10 or contact us to start a conversation:

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News

BREXIT

£1 billion at risk of being sent back to EU The Local Government Association has warned that the government is unlikely to invest almost £1 billion in local communities through the European Social Fund (ESF), risking the money being sent back to Brussels. The ESF is worth an estimated £3.1 billion of investment into the UK economy and runs from 2014-2020. However, the government has so far only been able to confirm that 48 per cent of the money has been allocated despite having had nearly five years of the seven year period. Based on the spending continuing at this level, which actually shows signs of slowing down rather than increasing, the LGA said this could result in £914 million being sent back to Brussels. Therefore,

council leaders are urging the government to ensure that all ESF cash is allocated before its end date of 2020 to ensure that local communities are getting the investment they desperately need. The LGA analysis follows the metro mayors of Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield and Tees Valley lobbying the government to devolve spending authority over the proposed capital that will replace their current European funding after Brexit. Andy Burnham of Greater Manchester, Steve Rotheram of Liverpool city region, Dan Jarvis of Sheffield city region and Ben Houchen of Tees Valley said in a joint statement to the Financial Times that ‘substantial devolution of power and resources’ must come out of Westminster

and be given to the English regions. The EU currently provides annual financing of £50 million to Greater Manchester, £32 million to Liverpool, £30 million to Sheffield and £25 million to the Tees Valley.

READ MORE tinyurl.com/yc8ktwj3

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Y O U R F L E E T ’S F I N A N C E S T O T A L L Y T R A N S F O R M E D To ke e p r u n n in g co s t s at a m in im u m th e All- N ew F o cus ran ge d eli ve r s h igh ly co m p etiti ve low e m i s s i o n s f ro m 91g /k m CO 2 . Plus, yo u an d yo u r d r i ve r s w ill b e n ef it f ro m a co m b in e d f u el e co n o my of u p to 80.7m p g . D i s cove r m o re at fo r d .co.u k /n ew-fo cu s o r co nt ac t th e F o r d B us in e s s Ce ntre: 03457 2 3 2 3 2 3 | f linf o r m@f o r d .co m

P11D

BIK

C0 2

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28% - 22%

138- 91g/km

45.6- 80.7

Official fuel consumption figures in mpg (l/100km) for the All-New Ford Focus range: urban 36.2-74.3 (7.8-3.8), extra urban 54.3-85.6 (5.2-3.3), combined 45.6-80.7 (6.2-3.5). Official CO2 emissions 138-91g/km. The mpg figures quoted are sourced from official EU-regulated test results (EU Regulation 715/2007 and 692/2008 as last amended), are provided for comparability purposes and may not reflect your actual driving experience. Information correct at time of going to print.

Council Comment

A county council perspective:GB comment Cllr Philip Atkins, leader of Staffordshire County Council and County Councils Network Conservative vice-chairman

Councillor Philip Atkins

As we begin to look towards 2019 and setting our budgets for next year, many of my colleagues have remarked that it has never been so tough to balance the books. The County Councils Network (CCN) has warned that its 36 member authorities will have to set out almost £1 billion in new reductions and savings next year to deliver balanced budgets; on top of over £700 million already saved this present year. This is because CCN member councils collectively face a £3.2 billion funding gap by 2020, of which £1.8 billion is due to projected demand, and the vast remainder due to inflation. Whilst the funding gap will be met, it will be at the expense of local services, with our member councils facing unpalatable decisions in scaling back

some frontline services, reducing valuable but non-statutory services elsewhere (such as school crossing patrols), or by increasing charges. In addition, several councils have recorded significant in-year overspends already this financial year. Yet it is not just county councils that are struggling; this summer has seen stories on the precariousness of Torbay Council and Birmingham City Council. Local government on the whole faces a £7.8 billion funding gap by 2025 that, if filled, will only keep services standing still. The warning signs for local government funding have been there for a while; and the situation is being exacerbated with further grant reductions against a growing demand for services. In Staffordshire, as of August, we have 1,117 ‘Looked After

Children’ in care, 2,497 elderly and frail people in care homes, 6,446 people with long-term health conditions, and over 1,500 people with learning disabilities. Care services for people such as these are now consuming well over half our budgets, and demand is only going to rise. It is in this context that the Prime Minister’s declaration at the Conservative Party Conference earlier this month that austerity is to end, is significant. CCN, alongside the Local Government Association, has been leading calls for an injection of extra resource for local government to avoid truly draconian cutbacks to local services. A recent CCN survey of its councils found that two-thirds of county leaders believe they will be unable to set a balanced budget in 2020/21 if no new money is available to local authorities. If there is to be an uplift in public spending, local authorities must be at the front of the queue. Local government has done more than any other part of the public sector to restore the national finances of the country; but we are not looking for a pat on the back. The reality is that councils need significant resource to maintain, and improve, public services that are vital to our communities after eight years of austerity. Finally; the fairer funding review has elicited much hope and expectation that the system of financing local government will be updated. Our member councils are clear that they believe the current system to be unfair, opaque and outdated, and it does not recognise the higher costs of delivering services in rural settings. CCN figures show that counties will receive £182 per head in core grant funding in 2018/19 compared to £482 per head for councils in London. Our member councils argue that their higher council tax base is a product of years of underfunding and masks the underlying unfairness of the system; with some London boroughs charging half the average shire county tax bill, there is the suggestion that county residents are in effect subsidising services enjoyed by those in affluent parts of London. Our chairman Cllr Paul Carter warned last month that ‘the elastic can be stretched no further’. If our members’ warnings are not heeded, the elastic will break with dire consequences for the communities we serve. L FURTHER INFORMATION www.countycouncilsnetwork.org.uk

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Testing with our baby

PAT100 Series PAT testing is awkward work at the best of times, that’s why the new PAT100 series of battery operated PAT testers from Megger are: ¢ Tough ¢ Small and light ¢ Easy to operate ¢ Test everything from standard kit to IT and surge protected equipment There are two levels of testers PAT120 simple PAT tester and PAT150 the full function hand-held tester. Which one would be best for you? Find out, call 01304 502 101 or email uksales@megger.com for your Pocket guide to PAT testing Megger Ltd, Archcliffe Road, Dover, CT17 9EN, T. 01304 502101

With the summer heatwave now just a An energy price cap was first proposed by memory and the transition to autumn the then Labour leader Ed Miliband in 2013. well underway, soon people will start Another way to reduce energy bills and contemplating whether it is time to put on tackle climate change at the same time is to a jumper and flick the thermostat on. Most improve the efficiency of buildings in the UK. people take it for granted that we can have With now apparent cross-party consensus that a warm dry home at the flick of a switch, as we need to improve the energy efficiency of long as we don’t mind paying the energy bill. homes, the Policy Connect think tank decided Energy bills get a lot of air time in to investigate options for improving domestic Westminster, with politicians of all parties energy efficiency. The Westminster Sustainable getting a bulging post bag every year about Business Forum (WSBF), Policy Connect’s built high energy bills, and stories of elderly environment group, has a strong research constituents being unable to pay to heat their catalogue on energy efficiency, having looked homes. Therefore, publicly criticising the ‘Big into increasing the energy efficiency of the Six’ energy companies and asking for stricter public estate (Leaner & Greener 2011), intervention from the regulator Ofgem often commercial sector (Building Efficiency 2013) appears to make good sense. Criticising the and the construction sector (Building Better energy market is no longer just a pastime for 2015). WSBF also pointed to the need to left-leaning politicians either: Prime Minister increase water efficiency in our recent Bricks Theresa May has lost faith in the free & Water report (2018), as 20 per cent energy market, saying earlier this of the energy used in the home year: “It’s often older people or is used to heat water. With those on low incomes who 4.5 are stuck on rip-off energy How much progress fuel-po million tariffs, so today we are have we made? or hom introducing legislation WSBF published e in Engl s to force energy our latest report on a n d w , ould cu it companies to change energy efficiency, r nearly 3 rently take their ways. Our energy Warmer & Greener, 5 y e price cap will cut bills in Parliament in April a r s to treat al for millions of families.” 2016, which provided l the

fue poor ho mes in l the UK

Volume 25.5 | GOVERNMENT BUSINESS MAGAZINE

Written by Jim Clark, sustainability manager, Westminster Sustainable Business Forum

A key way to reduce energy bills and tackle climate change at the same time is to improve the efficiency of buildings in the UK. Jim Clark, Westminster Sustainable Business Forum, explains why as he looks at the progress made in the last few years

Facilities management

Energy efficiency: where do we stand?

a guide to policymakers on the future for energy efficiency policy in the UK. The report was co-chaired by Conservative MP Peter Aldous and Shadow Energy Minister Dr Alan Whitehead. With housing being a devolved matter, the report also drew comparisons between policies of the devolved administrations and England, with the Welsh Assembly and the Scottish Parliament leading the way in some areas of energy efficiency. Further, the WSBF held an event in Parliament in November 2017 reviewing the progress with respect to energy efficiency policy since the report had been published. After almost two and a half years since Warmer & Greener was published, how much progress have we made? Report cochair Peter Aldous said: “I don’t feel warmer yet, but there is a slight twinge of green appearing. We must upgrade the UK’s existing housing stock - a warm, comfortable home is a vital prerequisite for all UK citizens.” Whitehead agreed, saying: “We could go much further on emissions reductions through energy efficiency. More homes need to be treated. Substantial carbon savings are possible.” The government’s key initiative for delivering energy efficiency has been the Energy Company Obligation (ECO) scheme, which has changed since it was first introduced in 2013. Originally designed as a scheme to leverage energy efficiency retrofit for homes from contributions from the Big Six energy companies, it is now only narrowly focused on those homes that are defined as being in fuel poverty. A recent legislative development has been the government introducing the Domestic Gas and Electricity (Tariff Cap) Bill to Parliament in February this year, and it receiving Royal Assent onto the statute book in July 2018, before Parliament broke up for summer recess. This new Act means that energy bills will now be capped this winter, meaning a reduction in energy bills for some customers as bills are capped to a maximum of £1,136. Since the Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) E

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 was brought in, the public awareness of the energy efficiency performance of buildings has increased. I can’t be alone in beginning to wonder how I might make my own D-rated house less draughty and more energy efficient. The government stated in its Clean Growth Strategy (published October 2017) that it will consult on raising commercial energy efficiency standards. All fuel poor homes will be improved to EPC band C by 2030, with an aspiration for this to be extended to as many homes as possible by 2035. One thing that the government could do is introduce minimum energy efficiency standards for homes on the rental and retail markets, for example a minimum of band C by 2030 and ratcheting up the minimum required band over time. This would give the markets a clear signal and an achievable goal in the medium term and also set long-term ambition. Efforts should also be made by the government to replace the funding previously provided by the Green Deal (launched in 2012, withdrawn in 2015) support package by promoting ‘green mortgages’ where new home buyers are allowed to borrow against their mortgage to improve the energy efficiency of their homes. Domestic energy efficiency is an important national infrastructure priority. The previous government established the National Infrastructure Commission (NIC) in 2015, with a raison d’être to produce a National Infrastructure Assessment (NIA) once a Parliament which would look to evaluate what infrastructure priorities the UK has over the next 30 years. The NIA was published in July 2018, and said on energy efficiency: ‘The UK must now address this problem. In the short term, improving the energy efficiency of the UK’s buildings will reduce demand for heat and mitigate some of the emissions. In the longer term, it will also reduce the costs associated with delivering low carbon heat infrastructure’. WSBF’s Are we Warmer & Greener yet? event in 2017 recommended an ambitious and cost-effective national infrastructure plan for domestic energy efficiency installation, which would be a substantial boost to the economy, reduce carbon emissions, reduce energy bills, and improve public health and well-being. This would also be a good borrow to invest opportunity for the government, requiring £1.1 billion of additional national spending, but leveraging a further £3.9 billion in funding commitments from the private sector. Substantial savings could be made to the NHS as well, due to less people becoming sick from living in cold damp houses. There are strong links between the efficiency of domestic buildings and their occupants’ health and well-being.

national commitments to mitigate climate change in the 2008 Climate Change Act, the UK needs to reduce carbon emissions from all sectors. However, progress on reducing emissions from buildings has been slow: there has only been a reduction in emissions from buildings of 5.7 per cent since 1990. In comparison, industry has reduced emissions by 53.9 per cent and power has decarbonised by 61.3 per cent in that time. This is despite good advances being made in domestic energy efficiency over the past 20 years: domestic natural gas use is down 27 per cent and domestic electricity use is down 30 per cent since 2004. But there is a feeling that progress in the policy area has stalled, despite the government and the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) stating that energy efficiency is a priority. Considering the UK’s climate change commitments up to 2050, the emissions footprint of all buildings in the UK will need to be reduced to almost zero by then. The positive news is that there are good energy efficiency technologies available to us, with more possible with new innovations - 25 per cent of all energy used in the home could be saved through efficiency measures, with up to 50 per cent possible in the near future. Innovations like Energiesprong should be supported by the government to trial schemes on the hard to treat homes that require deep retrofit to make them carbon neutral and energy efficient. Unfortunately, the level of government support for energy efficiency has wavered. Contributors to our Warmer & Greener report from local authorities spoke to us of the damaging effect that budget cuts have had to the vital advice and engagement with local communities on energy advice services. Energy efficiency installations in homes have fallen off a cliff in recent years – a 95 per cent drop since 2012 according to the NIC, and funding has been cut by over 50 per cent. Energy efficiency retrofit of fuel poor homes under

the ECO scheme is only delivering at a rate of 2,500 homes per week. Considering that there are 4.5 million fuel-poor homes in England, so at current rate of delivery it would take nearly 35 years to treat all the fuel poor homes in the UK. This renovation needs to be done, as around 60 per cent of these houses are very inefficient (EPC band E, F or G). Therefore the NIC has targeted an eightfold increase in the number of homes currently being treated. The Warmer & Greener report also found in its interviews and evidence gathered from the sector that many people thought of the removal of progressive regulation in the sector by the previous government as a backwards step - the Code for Sustainable Homes in 2015, and the ‘zero carbon standard’ in 2016. Whilst the government has given no indication that these regulations will be reinstated, there is increasing clamour to review the Building Regulations 2012, following the Grenfell Tower disaster. This could provide an opportunity to work with the construction and energy sectors to improve the energy performance of new and existing buildings. But there is a long way to go, and more backing for energy efficiency is needed from the government. The UK’s housing stock is one of the least energy efficient in Europe, which has a number of negative consequences including high energy bills and carbon emissions, and poor health and amenity for the householder. In order to meet the legal commitments under the 5th Carbon Budget (2028-2032), we must significantly reduce the carbon emissions from UK buildings. There is much room for improvement - 31 per cent of all UK carbon emissions come from buildings (14 per cent of which currently comes from residential buildings). We now need more than aspirations from government if we are to decarbonise buildings in line with progress made in other sectors, and we need some new ambitious policies from BEIS to deliver on the aspirations laid out in the Clean Growth Strategy. The WSBF will watch commitments made by the Chancellor in the upcoming budget in two months’ time with great interest. L

Facilities management

“We could go much further on emissions reductions through energy efficiency. More homes need to be treated. Substantial carbon savings are possible.”

FURTHER INFORMATION www.policyconnect.org.uk/wsbf/home

Energy efficiency technologies There is also climate change and decarbonisation to consider. Under the UK’s

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Flood management

Trees – a vital link in urban stormwater management Suzanne Simmons talks about flood risk management and how strong flood defence can be achieved through the charity’s urban tree planting and Edible Playgrounds programmes

Written by Suzanne Simmons, projects director, Trees for Cities

The m

ass Trees for Cities is Cities across the UK plantin g o the only UK charity are rightly focusing on f urban trees an working at a national the impacts of d can col woodlands mitigating and international poor quality air and as a l e scale to improve result Trees for Cities is a significtively have lives through the able to tap into funding c a n i t n and creasing creation of greener that promotes increased cities. We do this by tree cover and green the treebenefits as s grow working alongside screens. In addition, and and ma partner organisations, more importantly, there are ture local authorities and comprehensive approaches volunteers. Our success being considered to mitigate comes from revitalising against the multiple impacts of forgotten spaces, creating healthier climate change and the unpredictable environments and growing food with kids. weather patterns we are presently The name Trees for Cities demonstrates a witnessing. A key area is mitigation against singular focus, when in fact the planting of the impact of surface water flooding and trees rarely happens in isolation, especially linking projects in to the objectives of the way we do it. We consult communities local flood risk management strategies. on our project designs and engage them in Localised flooding can often be due to tree planting. We are currently focusing on ageing below ground sewer infrastructure clustering site selection through strategic where combined sewer overflows can spill partnerships with London Boroughs a heady mix of foul and surface water into including Ealing, Redbridge and Lambeth. urban rivers as a consequence of short It is with these partner organisations and intense periods of heavy rainfall. Inadequate others that we are able to consider how capacity below ground can leave a back-up our projects and our match funding can slot of surface water that is unable to enter into local and regional ambitions for green the sewerage system quickly enough. infrastructure networks and catchments. The Environment Agency’s best estimate

of the economic cost of the winter floods 2015 to 2016 in England was £1.6 billion with approximately £73 million of that cost hitting local authorities. It makes sense to consider how to mitigate against this in the most effective, efficient and, where feasible, simplest ways possible. Where previously it has been a reactive response to very local or catchment flood events, increasingly the steer for improved national and local infrastructure is emerging from top down. The National Infrastructure Assessment for the UK made recommendations in July 2018 on the country’s identified infrastructure needs and priorities. The government will now have to formally respond. The Assessment includes a range of recommendations, including the government putting in place a ‘long-term strategy to deliver a nationwide standard of flood resilience by 2050 with funding for flood risk management increasing significantly over the coming decades’; and ‘these plans should evaluate the full range of options including traditional flood defences, ‘green infrastructure’ (whether natural flood management or sustainable drainage systems), individual property measures and spatial planning’. E Volume 25.5 | GOVERNMENT BUSINESS MAGAZINE

Cities across the UK are rightly focusing on mitigating the impacts of poor quality air and as a result Trees for Cities is able to tap into funding that promotes increased tree cover and green screens defences across England it will be interesting to see how this balances out when spent across hard grey infrastructure into the softer green/blue solutions; how costs for hard and expensive interventions compare to costs that deliver effective green-blue interventions, and how that equates to value for money and public expenditure. It may be worth local planning authorities and those making strategic decisions using more simple and visible green infrastructure, solutions such as SuDS, to mitigate against localised surface water flooding; or the provision of temporary or permanently well designed space in places where surface water is likely to exceed existing drainage systems. Trees for Cities uses a partnership approach to deliver projects by bringing match funding and a long term connection to capacity building for future maintenance and monitoring of sites. These relationships can bring sustainable high value results locally. Trees for Cities is more often included in developing retrofit solutions for individual open spaces that may have been sealed by non-porous paving such as school playgrounds and carparks; or on open spaces managed as close mown amenity grassland, a maintenance approach that offers low level benefits to the environment. In cracking open these sealed-in surfaces and loosening the soil of bland grasslands, Trees for Cities aims to generate a greater range of benefits and improve the functionality of the open spaces

Flood management

 Natural flood management Meanwhile the government’s 25 year Environment Plan (25YEP) supports many of Trees for Cities’ objectives and provides hooks for local planning authorities to embed green infrastructure in their local planning policies. The 25YEP focuses on natural flood management solutions; an industry-led voluntary code of practice on flood risk planned for this year; a goal to plant one million trees in England’s towns and cities by 2022; supports a new Northern Forest; a national Tree Champion has been appointed; a new woodland creation grant scheme will be introduced; and a Tree Health Resilience Plan is scheduled. The revised National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF), released in July 2018, further strengthens the case for sustainable drainage systems (SuDS) and natural flood management, placing emphasis on local authorities to consult with lead local flood authorities in areas of flood risk. Strengthening the need for SuDS is welcome, especially where the enactment of Schedule 3 of the Flood and Water Management Act (2010) is not in place. However, it only applies to larger developments. It may not capture a multitude of smaller developments and the definition of exemptions will be almost certainly be challenged. Essentially the power to use low cost effective solutions that provide multiple benefits can be delivered through local planning policy and be supported by governmental steer even if not fully embedded in legislation. The onus however will be on local authorities to consider how best to incorporate these plans through limited resources and into policy. Creating policy will be essential but enforcing new policies will require additional time and finances from already stretched sources. With £36 million allocated by the government in March 2018 for flood

we work on. These may be rain gardens created by disconnecting the down pipes of buildings, to provide educational resources on the water cycle, and how to make Edible Playgrounds thrive, or fruit orchards and community forests in under-utilised green spaces; or street trees along heavily polluted highways. In taking this approach, the value of water can be appreciated as a resource and not a waste product. For example a study in Salford backed by the Environment Agency, City of Trees, Salford City Council, Urban Vision, United Utilities and monitored by University of Manchester, is currently assessing the ability of street trees planted in especially designed trenches to reduce the amount of water entering sewers during periods of heavy rainfall. They have recently reported how just three London Plane trees have retained up to 78 per cent of surface water runoff from adjacent highways and delayed the remainder by up to three hours before reaching the existing below ground drainage system. Evidence to support the approach of making landscapes work harder They become more productive, more biodiverse and offer greater resilience to flooding. This can be through incorporation of water retention components such as swales, basins and ponds on the surface. Projects can all contribute to water quality improvement by creating greater scope for infiltration, slowing the flow of surface water and removing suspended pollutants before they enter urban water courses. Whilst a single rain garden and tree pit may have limited impact, collectively and in larger numbers within a catchment area, they can support flood risk management agendas at local level. The mass planting of urban trees and woodlands can collectively have a significant and increasing benefits as the trees grow and mature. This will be evidenced over time when Trees For Cities completes the first mass tree planting event in London with the Greater London Authority (GLA) in December 2018. In many respects the work that Trees for Cities has been doing for the past 25 years has proven a successful model because of its simplicity and transparency, and because the outputs are replicable, interactive, visible, aesthetic and provide multiple benefits to communities in greatest need. Most importantly the planting of trees provides a lasting legacy to communities that continues to increase with each decade when the right species is used in the right location. L FURTHER INFORMATION www.treesforcities.org

Volume 25.5 | GOVERNMENT BUSINESS MAGAZINE

Power For Our Generation

There are many ways to store or produce energy but when it comes to guaranteeing standby or emergency electrical power, in terms of cost, flexibility and responsiveness, thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s no better option than a generator set from FG Wilson. Our products range from ready-to-run generator sets to complete bespoke turnkey power systems with remote monitoring, all with lifetime product support from our dealers. Based in the UK for the last 50 years, weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve worked together with a multitude of customers in all environments globally and since 1990 have installed more than 625,000 generator sets around the world, with as much combined power generation capacity as the entire UK power grid.

To find out more, visit us at www.fgwilson.com

Generator sets have been around for a long time and the simple economics of securing power mean that they are a strong consideration for many customers in many different situations

FG Wilson has been manufacturing generator sets for more than 50 years, installing more than 625,000 units since 1990 (as far back as their computer records can search). Paul Creighton, managing director of FG Wilson, can see why they are a popular choice: “When it comes to guaranteeing standby or emergency electrical power, in terms of cost, flexibility and responsiveness, for many people, the best option is a generator set.” In its simplest form, a diesel generator set has an engine driving an AC generator or alternator which produces an electrical output. The engine and alternator are fixed to a rigid steel chassis which may contain a fuel tank, there’s a control panel which may be for manual start, auto start on mains failure or remotely operated and the entire package is often contained in a sound-attenuated enclosure which protects it from weather and reduces noise to comfortable levels in urban environments. That’s been the basic principle for a long time and for several decades FG Wilson have been at the forefront in driving efficiency of generator sets to new levels. Diesel engines are the most common prime mover for generator sets and the reasons have always been practical: diesel engines are more economical to run, typically easier to service and maintain, fuel is safer to store

and transport than petrol or gas fuel and engines are durable. Because the engines operate at relatively low RPM in power generation applications, they can expect a long working life and in countries where usage is high, examples of generator sets with 30,000 operating hours are not uncommon. Paul notes: “In the UK, around 80 per cent of generator sets are bought as a source of standby power and most of the remainder for temporary power, often running continuously at construction sites, events or providing prime power when mains supply is down, for example after storms or during maintenance. This high percentage of standby applications is driven by increased safety and power security needs: meeting legislation and due to increasing reliance on internet technology and connectivity in business. 20 years ago, most businesses could at least partially function with pen and paper when electric power failed, but today everything comes to a standstill without electricity.” Fuel economy Today, emissions from combustion engines are something of which we are all more aware. FG Wilson engines are sourced from UK-based manufacturer Perkins, designed in the UK and among the most modern and fuel-efficient engines available. All meet or

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Powering on – economics of securing power for customers surpass standards wherever the engines are being used. Rightly, there’s growing interest in renewable sources of energy. Paul says: “We’re seeing this in many of our export markets where a generator set may be running for four or five hours a day and customers are seeking to reduce operating costs. We’re working with telecoms networks in regions such as South-East Asia and Africa and supplying hybrid generator sets with solar panels as part of the package. “Thinking ahead, in countries where generator sets may be running for several hours a day, we can see solar panels, batteries, wind turbines and generator sets all linked and capable of powering remote settlements. In regions like Africa and Asia, this has huge potential. In other regions where mains supply is more secure and power outages less common, energy storage is also starting to become an option for some users. These are usually domestic or other light users of electricity, who may have enough electrical energy stored to see through short outages. “But where you have a facility which requires substantial electric power, like data centres or hospitals, current renewable and energy storage technology is not sufficiently well developed to be a commercially viable option for standby power. For guaranteed continuity of power, you still need a generator set.” UK dealers A wide dealer network across the UK represents and supports the entire FG Wilson range. For some customers, this means picking a ready-to-run generator set, while for others it means working together on load requirements, finding the right generator set, designing the complete layout of the generator set including cooling and fuel systems, installation and commissioning. Dealers also offer full 24/7 support with warranty with rapid parts availability, supported by a major parts operation based in Desford in Leicestershire, carrying more than 11,500 product lines and shipping up to three million parts a year. Paul says: “If you have a critical power need, the economics add up. In the UK, a generator set might run for only a few hours a year but in those hours, it can more than pay for itself in terms of ensuring business continuity and health and safety.” L FURTHER INFORMATION www.fgwilson.com

Volume 25.5 | GOVERNMENT BUSINESS MAGAZINE

Transport Written by Darren Shirley, Campaign for Better Transport

Bringing about a more sustainable transport system The Campaign for Better Transport’s Darren Shirley discusses the current state of public transport and how local communities can encourage sustainable transport in their regions As I write, I have been in post as chief Allied to that is the clear imperative to executive for Campaign for Better Transport reduce carbon emissions to deliver against for seven weeks. Much of that time I have our commitments in the Paris Agreement been speaking with leaders in the transport to stave off an environmental crisis. industry, local government and Whitehall Rural communities across the country are about the state of the nation’s transport even more deeply affected by transport issues, networks, and how we can bring about with far too many now being left isolated a more sustainable transport system. with no public transport, removing even the Over the past three weeks I have also spent choice to move away from the reliance on time hearing opinions from across the political the car. These transport deserts are expanding spectrum attending the Conservative, Labour as bus services serving some communities and Liberal Democrat party conferences. There disappear. Our recent Buses in Crisis report has been a diversity of views on the fringe of showed that in the last eight years alone each conference, as well as on the conference more than 3,000 local authority supported stages. What is clear from all of these though bus services have been cut, further isolating is the alignment on what the problems are. people from neighbouring towns, employment Roads in towns and cities across the opportunities and leisure facilities. country are becoming clogged with Add to that the poor levels of congestion affecting journey service regularly experienced It times, with car drivers or by rail passengers - train seems bus passengers equally services that arrive late, to me a impacted by traffic skip stations, or carriages no brainer coming to a standstill. that are crammed at peak sustain to invest in Appalling levels of air times - contributing to able tra pollution are damaging diminishing trust in the t o nsport encour people’s health and railways and brewing to walk age people the environment, anger on some routes. , with particulate Beyond these more move bcycle, and and NOx emissions visible and tangible y public a real and persistent manifestations of the transpo rt issue for urban areas problems with our transport that is a public health crisis. system is a more significant

BUSINESS INFORMATION FOR LOCAL AND CENTRAL GOVERNMENT | www.governmentbusiness.co.uk

change that is only now starting to be felt by the industry and local authorities. The way we work, shop and travel is changing. Internet shopping, delivery services and home working is transforming the way we move around and between our cities, towns and villages. This will create further pressures on the existing system, changing the nature of the demand on our infrastructure, along with the expectations and needs of the transport users. Local and regional integration These problems leave transport bodies and local authorities with significant issues to tackle related to encouraging economic activity, preventing isolation, or improving public health. But it will be increasingly challenging to do so without the right focus, prioritisation and funding. What I have seen so far is a transport system that is fragmented, and isn’t always putting the interests of the passenger first. There is a need for a more seamless and integrated transport system led by local and regional bodies, as well as at the national level. We need a transport system that works for the communities it is serving, providing for their needs now, but also accounting for the changing nature of demand and decline that will affect the viability of some transport in the future. Allied to that is the need for the system to harness the opportunity of latent demand

Future funding The need to focus on outcomes is going to be most acute when it comes to decisions on funding. The benefits of sustainable travel are apparent and real for people and communities, as well as the economy, but they are not always recognised in funding decisions. The uncertainty on future funding, as well as reduction, or lack of revenue support, and a lack of capital funding are barriers to local government that hold back investment in the opportunities that a more sustainable transport system could provide. Given the clear benefits to air quality, health, employment and consumer spending it seems

Rural communities across the country are even more deeply affected by transport issues, with far too many now being left isolated with no public transport, removing even the choice to move away from the reliance on the car to me a no brainer to invest in sustainable transport to encourage people to walk, cycle, and move by public transport. I believe that many local authorities agree with this based on what I have heard so far, but what is needed at this stage is that voice to be heard and acted upon in HM Treasury, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government and the Department for Transport. In reality the changes that are going to have the most impact on communities by making the transport system more sustainable aren’t the ones that will garner media attention; they will be the carefully considered plans for how the transport network integrates in an area, and how people are helped to choose a more sustainable form of transport. But they are the ones that we must encourage the government to fund and support further than it currently does. With the Spending Review due next year, and a Budget very soon, there are choices that the government can make to support a more sustainable transport system and provide the powers and funding to enable local authorities to deliver what works for their community. I believe there’s an opportunity through encouraging a more sustainable transport system to address the problems we are facing as a nation and bring benefits to local communities across the country. L FURTHER INFORMATION www.bettertransport.org.uk

Transport

in some areas where the public transport system no longer meets the needs of local people, trapping both individuals and entire communities in a state of car dependency. New technology will also shape the future of transport, and will change the way choices are made and the type of transport that people choose to use as a result. There are benefits from technology available today that can and should be harnessed to drive improvements across all forms of transport, not just private cars, including the sharing and use of data to inform improved operations and people’s choice of transport. The technology available today should also be harnessed to ensure better integration to better serve our communities. There are clearly changes that should come, and they should be focused on improving the well-being of communities, quality of life and the environment. But these outcomes and a focus on the passenger aren’t always apparent. Decisions that will shape the future of the system are going to have to be made in the coming years at the national level, including what comes from the recently announced review of the railways; the need to look at taxi and PHV regulation; and decisions on funding regimes and public subsidy that will have a profound impact on the ability of some services to continue, or investment decisions that will be made.

Tackling Manchester’s congestion chaos Mayor of Greater Manchester Andy Burnham has urged the government to provide Greater Manchester the necessary resources to tackle the congestion that’s causing chaos on its roads. The Greater Manchester Combined Authority claims that congestion, which costs an estimated £1.3 billion annually, is worsening in the region as leaders do not currently have the powers or access to the required funding to tackle the underlying issues that are causing congestion and delays across the city-region. Having already provided extra buses from Park & Ride sites and invested in its highways and public transport infrastructure, the Mayor is seeking devolved powers over Highways England to help Greater Manchester coordinate roadworks more effectively, devolved power to Transport for the North over rail franchises, powers to enable better local management of roads, as well as for the Transport Order to be brought forward as soon as possible Burnham said: “Congestion has reached a tipping point – it’s causing major problems across Greater Manchester, making people late for jobs, school and even footballers late for their matches. It’s also affecting the quality of the air we breathe, which is a major public health issue, contributing to 1,200 deaths a year. “We’ve been tasked by the government to deliver a Clean Air Plan which tackles congestion and reduces air pollution, but we cannot deliver this plan without further powers and funding over a range of areas including roadworks, highways and rail. Major cities including London, Berlin, Madrid and New York all have these powers, but Manchester lags behind, so I’m calling on government to give us these powers now and fulfil its promises to the north.”

Volume 25.5 | GOVERNMENT BUSINESS MAGAZINE

Road management

At the forefront of the changes on the road

recognising users’ huge legacy of investment artsm members adopt a responsible approach to getting the best outcomes and network opportunities where possible from the existing infrastructure, maximising the benefits and existing compatibility and relevance for new technology and continuing to develop compatible and sustainable products rather than throwing baby out with the bath water in solving new user problems. The change in addressing global goals has also impacted in the industry and the need to minimise environmental impact, lower whole life cost and at the same time to Artsm, the Association for Road Traffic Safety and Management, maximise efficiency have all been adopted by our members in their processes. recognises the need to be at the forefront of the changes that We are working hard to establish are coming in the road management and safety sectors the role we can play in the development of an As integrated vision working associa an t i together across sectors o n , we are plea support seamless s e d that the tojourneys, UK inte Mobility as a Service (MaaS), Cocurrent nds to adopt E operative & Autonomous legislat U transport Vehicles (CAV) and ion and Co-operative Intelligent not abando Transport Systems (Cn it ITS) as we contemplate the significant changes these developments will bring – for example, what will the impact be on potential mobility poverty with the introduction of widespread MaaS? We are currently undertaking a further review on the use of scrolling VMS. Whilst regulation does not currently provide for this, manufacturers have the capacity to provide this and, indeed, have been requested to fulfil a need. Artsm seeks to enable its members to meet customer demands but Artsm is the Association for Road Traffic Sector Schemes and play a key part in the also to comply with regulation, and here Safety and Management, a trade association development and application of regulations, we play a part in addressing a system with approximately 50 members, from large specifications and standards which are that does not suit the needs of the user to corporates to SMEs and local authority applicable within the UK and that work for create standards which ensure safety and sign makers, with an overall turnover in our members and their customers. As well as maximum benefits to the road users. excess of £1.3 billion and from which we contributing to Traffic Advisory Leaflets (TALs), We are also reviewing the significant can draw a raft of experience, expertise artsm also provides its own Guidance Notes increase in the use of temporary traffic signs and knowledge across the industry. for its members and as procurement aids. and installation to ensure best practice and Originally known as the Association of We support the DfT projections to build will be working closely with HE and TSG to Road Traffic Signs Management, we have resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive develop a revised improved national standard. been in existence since 1934, extending and sustainable industrialisation and in the 1970s and 1980s to include other foster innovation and making cities and Engaging in innovation aspects of road assets and furniture. We human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient When looking at disruptive technologies, currently have working groups to cover and sustainable. In terms of procurement we can take some credit as an industry in bollards and sign illumination, traffic signs, artsm supports the use of open standards being able to survive for the main part, variable message signs and traffic signals to maximise the interoperability of many changes over the last 10 years, and and control – our members cover the areas of equipment from different manufacturers so the challenge of re-evaluating and taking static, portable and temporary equipment. giving users a procurement choice and control is not beyond our capacity. Disruptive We lobby government to establish keeping the market competitive. changes can become less disruptive by standards where these do not exist to engaging in innovation and exploration create better and safer working practices Technology and progress and recognising the need for different and ensure that the UK continues to be The association recognises the need business models to keep up with the times. regarded as a worldwide exemplar in the to be at the forefront of the changes We saw the introduction of LEDs to creation of standards and policy and the that are coming. We keep our members the market in the 1990s and rose to the global agenda for sustainable development. alerted to progress and expansion of new challenge, providing significant savings in We keep abreast of global and national technologies and how these are implemented energy consultation, reduced maintenance issues and provide guidance for members elsewhere. In addition, we consult closely and improved reliability. Similarly, the and their customers on the requirements with DfT, Highways England and local current growth in cloud technology has and implementation of regulations. authorities on their visions for the future. also allowed adaptation by members Aartsm is an active participant on a number We also recognise that there is a finite into current asset management. of National Standards’ Body Committees in capacity of network demand and technology As signage technology has improved addition to Department for Transport (DfT) alone with not overcome this – for example so has the road users demands to be working groups and National Highways the M5/A303 corridor and holiday traffic. In

BUSINESS INFORMATION FOR LOCAL AND CENTRAL GOVERNMENT | www.governmentbusiness.co.uk

Changes ahead With Brexit there will still be a continuing requirement for UK manufacturers to

Road management

kept informed. We can see the evidence on all road improvement sites, that now provide as standard, additional information via signs to explain the reasons for roadworks, how long they will be in place and the expected time delay etc. Most static signs are now manufactured from long lasting prismatic films with the signage digitally printed bringing an end to lichen moss sitting on the top of vinyl letters. Aluminium substrates have been replaced by more carbon neutral composite materials. Selfrighting bollards are now seen as standard, reducing electricity consumption, minimising maintenance and offering greater durability. Variable message signs, lane control and MIDAS are at the heart of Smart Motorways allowing the hard shoulder to be used as a running carriageway. Signals on both permanent and temporary sites operate on more sophisticated electronic management that minimises traffic delays and disruption. Signs now sit on passively safe posts reducing the need for additional protection barriers. Changes made in TSRGD 2016 will also impact on how the road network will look in the near future. Greater flexibility in sign design, local authority approval replacing DfT approvals, and the drive to de-cluttering the network, looking at how traffic signs and lines will work together to minimise clutter and of course cost.

follow EU standards in order for them to be accessible beyond the UK and arstm will continue to support its members by remaining involved in CEN/CENELEC. We must remember that legislation and policy often follow technology and artsm wants to ensure there is no possible erosion or degradation of standards when Brexit happens. We are pleased that the UK intends to adopt current EU transport legislation and not abandon it, since the UK were fundamental in its creation to ensure it worked for the UK at the outset. Artsm is already contemplating the changes that are ahead, questioning: how will signage be developed to adapt to C-ITS to provide for initiatives such as rod space booking, and dynamic route guidance to minimise the impact on traffic?; how will monetisation of journeys impact on road use?; and how will the changes impact on mobility poverty? It is clear that budget constraints on government departments are set to continue, and the trend for industry to step up to fill the void has already been established. Artsm will

play its part in establishing future direction by increasing its participation in a range of external organisations and co-operative discussions with other trade associations. We recognise the potential for the expansion of our membership to a new and increasing market of energy providers, AI, IT and data management companies with different business models with the potential to overcome fractured areas of transport provision. We welcome these new and potential stakeholders to support a common theme, limiting disruption and gaining shared knowledge for the benefit of us all. We are adapting as an association and we are currently exploring ways of expanding membership to include those with new ways of thinking and embracing new technology. We welcome interest from individuals, academia, consultants and organisations who wish to join with ARTSM in this. L FURTHER INFORMATION www.artsm.org.uk

Road risk is your responsibility Work Related Road Risk (WRRR) is everybody’s responsibility – even if you don’t have your own fleet. Work Related Road Risk (WRRR) is everybody’s responsibility - even if you don’t have your own fleet. The delivery of goods and services generates road transport and any collisions involving your suppliers can affect your business and, ultimately, your reputation. FORS, the Fleet Operator Recognition Scheme, is a nationwide, best practice accreditation scheme committed to driving up standards of road transport in our towns, cities and across the UK. Join the growing band of organisations that manage WRRR and air quality by including FORS in your procurement policies and supply chain contracts. FORS – helping you manage road risk.

Safety, Efficiency, Environment

www.fors-online.org.uk 08448 09 09 44

Volume 25.5 | GOVERNMENT BUSINESS MAGAZINE

tenet Tenet are a not for profit procurement service operating under charitable status. Our EU compliant frameworks and procurement consultancy service help public sector organisations reduce operating costs and save precious time. Our support is delivered nationwide and can be tailored to suit individual requirements.

Come along to meet our team and learn about how we can support your goals, we’ll be on stand F2 at the Public Sector Solutions Expo!

www.tenetprocurement.com mail@tenetservices.com 01376 511 411 Tenet Procurement Services | Procurement House | 23 Leslie Hough Way | Salford | M6 6AJ

Public Sector Show

Showcasing the Public Sector Solutions Expo 2018 Corby Ganesh, Portfolio Director at GovNet, discusses how this year’s show in Manchester Central is the ideal space for procurement professionals to network, meet suppliers and learn what’s new in the industry

Techn is a key ology t and ha heme s the potenti a l t o truly transfo services rm public and money save

The Public Sector Solutions Expo Manchester is the UK’s must-attend regional public sector event. It will take place on 20 November 2018 at Manchester Central and is free to attend for those working in the public sector. The expo’s aim is to encourage more effective and efficient public procurement policy, through purchasing better valuefor-money supplies, services and works to deliver improved public services. This year’s event has been designed to connect public sector procurement professionals, with leading exhibitors including Airbus Defence and Space, Pitney Bowes, CitySprint, Office of Government Property, Shell UK Oil Products, Screwfix, UK Fast and The Growth Company - political heavyweights and leaders from government departments and other leading public

sector bodies to develop a conversation around effective procurement strategies. The expo will engage a wide stakeholder audience of those connected with procurement to develop links, exchange ideas and create debate around delivering more effective and efficient public services. Bringing together over 1,500 senior public sector professionals and over 80 leading suppliers, this year’s event will centre around a day of knowledge, insight and collaboration. Stand-out features The event has four core themes – digital and technology, corporate solutions, local infrastructure, and workforce and leadership – and sessions, speakers and exhibits are built around these topics. These areas are designed to ultimately help the public

sector save money, improve performance and deliver better public services. One of the event’s central areas of focus is digital and tech. It offers the opportunity to solve any number of public sector challenges, with the potential to reduce costs, deliver more citizen-centred services and bring government into the 21st century. Casestudies and panel debates will discuss the challenges around lack of capital investment, security fears and legacy issues which make digital transformation difficult. The current state of the public sector is also a key emphasis which will underpin much of the event’s discussion. Big strides have been made to reform the sector and deliver improved value-for-money and avoid cuts to frontline services. Discussions will be conducted around what else can be done E Volume 25.5 | GOVERNMENT BUSINESS MAGAZINE

A globally recognised provider of workplace furnishings, Herman Millerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s world-class UK manufacturing facility, combined with a long history of demonstrating an ability to deliver value to the Public Sector, means that we are perfectly placed to help with your workplace needs. Not only that, but the majority of our products come with a market-leading 12 year warranty, giving you peace of mind in the future.

Come and see us Public Sector Show 2018 20 November Stand F21 Manchester Central

Herman Miller is a Crown Commercial Services (CCS) Framework Supplier. For more information please visit our website www.hermanmiller.com If youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d like to speak to someone directly about the benefits that working with us can bring, please contact Alex Gillies on either alex_gillies@hermanmiller.com or 07725 433027.

provider, will be returning as an exhibitor at this year’s expo, and are keen to engage with visitors about new tech. Stephen Jewell, head of Public Sector at UKFast, said: “Our accredited, secure cloud infrastructure supports the work of the whole public sector across the UK, offering hugely improved value for money for the taxpayer when it comes to delivering critical public services. We’re meeting people from public sector organisations who want to unlock new technologies like AI, big data and machine learning. We’re enabling them to do this by plugging in and accessing burstable cloud facilities at a moment’s notice, which is something they just couldn’t do before.”

The infrastructure of the sector will also be a major talking point and the event will look at ways to improve shared services, agile working and the development of more modern workplaces, as well as the delivery of infrastructure assets  to manage individual organisations’ finances and how to best engage suppliers. The infrastructure of the sector will also be a major talking point and the event will look at ways to improve shared services, agile working and the development of more modern workplaces, as well as the delivery of infrastructure assets. The final strand of the event will examine workforce and leadership in a time of austerity and the ability to recruit, retain and develop talented staff. The benefits of attending The event will offer solutions to help transform the UK’s public sector and improve public services, from more effective procurement processes to connecting transport systems. The expo has been designed to appeal to professionals who lead, manage and deliver

public services. Visitors can expect to meet more than 80 suppliers of innovative solutions and services designed to help the public sector save money, improve performance and ultimately deliver better public services. The event has attracted some leading industry speakers such as Adriana Laguna, Low Carbon Technologies and external engagement manager at UK Power Networks, Barry White, chief executive at Transport for the North, and Graham Botham, Network Rail’s Strategy & Planning director (North) who will offer thoughtprovoking discussion around challenges and solutions to benefit the public sector. Technology is a key theme and has the potential to truly transform public services and save money. UKFast, a leading UKbased and family-built cloud and hosting

Public Sector Show

Andy Burnham speaking at the Expo in Manchester

Digital tender opportunities The team behind the Public Sector Solutions Expo have claimed that technology and digital solutions have the potential to completely transform the UK’s public sector and deliver significant improvements to public services, from more effective procurement processes to connecting transport systems. The expo’s partner Tussell, a comprehensive online database of public tenders and government contracts in the UK, reveals that £5 billion worth of IT & Telecoms public sector tender opportunities (frameworks) are set to expire before November 2019. This is more than any other sector, presenting a wealth of lucrative opportunities to those who can offer the solutions and services the sector needs. The Public Sector Solutions Expo Manchester is the UK’s most important regional event for those leading, managing and delivering public services. More than 80 suppliers of innovative solutions and services designed to help the public sector save money, improve performance and ultimately deliver better public services, will showcase their products to visitors. Expo highlights Visitors will have the opportunity to discover and debate the delivery of better public services including cross-sector collaboration, the potential impact of digital technology and automation, recruitment and retention, and effective cost-saving measures. Attendees are encouraged to uncover new and innovative solutions, discuss specific challenges and trial out products at the Public Sector Solutions Expo Manchester 2018, the one-stop shop for public sector procurement. Speaking ahead of November’s show, Alyson Brett, managing director of NHS Commercial Solutions, said of technology within the public sector: “The NHS and local authorities are facing many challenges linked to the fact that we’re all living longer but new technologies including AI could help take some of the strain out of the system. Worryingly, there’s a growing trend for people to ‘DIY diagnose’ using Google. The technology of the future could stop that by providing people with access to an app that triages them around the health system based on an initial diagnosis.” L FURTHER INFORMATION https://psshowmcr.co.uk

Volume 25.5 | GOVERNMENT BUSINESS MAGAZINE

Helping organisations create happy, healthy & sustainable cultures We live and work in a world that is incredibly fast paced where poor work-life balance, long-hours, and increasing work pressures are far too common. This is increasing stress levels and mental health issues within our workplaces, which is directly impacting on our performance as organisations and as a country. Supporting research In May, the 2018 CIPD Wellbeing at Work survey suggested more than a fifth of organisations cited mental illness as the primary cause of long-term absence, with employees hiding their condition, taking more days off work than their openly unwell counterparts.

What are the benefits to employers to invest in health and wellbeing Employers who recognise mental illness and have procedures in place can expect: • Better employee morale and engagement • A healthier and more inclusive culture • Reduced number of sick days taken

2016 2016

41%

2018

55%

What can employers do to drive cultural change within their businesses? GC Organisation Improvement offer a number of programmes and workshops to educate staff and improve awareness including:

Workplace Wellbeing and Mental Resilience workshop - 1 day Our 1 day workshop provides a great opportunity to explore the topic of workplace wellbeing in the context of the organisation and its culture, strategy and underpinning values and behaviours.

Mental Health First Aid workshop 2 day Certified Programme Specifically designed to support individuals in dealing with ‘crises’ situations prior to professional help arriving, this session also offers participants the confidence, knowledge and understanding of mental health problems so they can support and guide colleagues appropriately.

Leadership programme - cultural change and shift 1 day Designed to meet the increasing needs within leadership and management teams to support wellbeing issues, not just by developing their confidence to support people effectively, but also by getting them to think about their own wellness

86%

25%

of colleagues report observing

‘presenteeism’ Reported increase in Mental health conditions

Only

in their organisation in the last 12 months.*

of organisations are taking steps to discourage it.*

For more information about our wellbeing programmes, get in touch today! orgimprove.growthco.uk orgimprove@growthco.uk 0161 237 4200 * Source: CIPD Health and Well-being at Work Survey 2018

Public Sector Show

Five ways public sector managers can ignite innovation It’s crucial that managers and leaders foster a culture of innovation and creative thinking within their teams, writes Gabriella Goddard Artificial intelligence and digitisation 1. Encourage curiosity are transforming the public sector, with The reality for most managers is that they procedures, data-collection, analysis and spend their time fire fighting, working even decision-making becoming increasingly through their busy to-do list, and delivering automated. In the face of this change, short-term goals. Problems often get creativity and innovation are more important solved with the first answer that comes than ever for government workers. to mind. However, with the fast pace of Leaders in the public sector can help improve technological change, we also need develop services and better engage workers by new ways of working and thinking. encouraging a culture where fresh ideas, new Curiosity is about questioning the status ways of working and innovation can thrive. quo, assumptions, and established beliefs. This However, a recent research report by YouGov involves encouraging exploration outside your and Microsoft showed that while 73 per field, researching best practice for inspiration, cent of British workers surveyed considered and new technological developments. For themselves creative, they felt their workplaces example, how could we use block chain were stifling innovation. Furthermore, the technology to transform government practices report showed that British companies and experiences? Or, how can the are at risk of falling behind because Internet of Things (IoT) make of a failure to encourage cities smarter by improving Improv creativity among their staff. public transport or i n g services The good news is drainage systems? Or public d to the that managers can be how can machine e p proactive in enabling learning technologies e n d s on an i greater creativity in their lead to earlier n underst nate employees by enhancing diagnoses within the a their own creative and health system? their ch nding of anging innovation leadership skills. and un This will create a halo effect met on the people around them. n e e d s Here are five ways public sector managers can become better innovators:

2. Take a coaching approach Employees, especially those working at the coalface, are often brimming with good ideas on how to improve things. However, they may not feel confident sharing their ideas, especially if they are unproven and could fail. In order to empower employees to think for themselves and boost their confidence to develop their best ideas further, managers can take a coaching approach. This involves keeping an open mind, practicing active listening and asking more exploration questions like ‘what about?’ and ‘how might we…?’ For example, Sean Frayne, chief officer at Derbyshire fire service, decided to listen to employee ideas and feedback, saying: “Some people still think managing people is about telling them what to do. From my experience it is about motivating, coaching them and encouraging them to be the best they can be.” After he inspired a change in the culture, independent E

Volume 25.5 | GOVERNMENT BUSINESS MAGAZINE

Improve client experience, drive efficiency and enable compliance At Pitney Bowes, we are committed to your success.

Public Sector organisations across the country are under

Stop by our presentation at

pressure to become digital by default. The reasons why are

12.35pm on the Digital and

simple: to improve the experience for both staff and users, whilst driving efficiencies, improving integrity, lowering costs and boosting productivity. Throw in the recent GDPR

Technology Stage to discover how to Improve client

legislation changes and it is a vital time for organisationsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;

experience, drive efficiency

digital transformations.

and enable compliance

Organisations can move towards becoming digital by default by looking at their Customer Communication Management solutions. Many of these solutions include automating repetitive tasks such as printing, inserting, franking and employing solutions that can easily manage resource dematerialisation, inbound mail digitisation. Working with you, Pitney Bowes can provide solutions and advice that allow you to communicate with your customers either physically or digitally, depending on what they want, ensuring your digital transformation is compliant.

Visit us at Stand B13 in the Digital and Technology zone to find out more

Presented by Barry Meaden â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Head of Scanning Solutions

Public Sector Show

 assessors found that even in the face of budget cuts, they could not find a single employee nor partner who would say anything negative about the service. 3. Develop user centricity Improving services to the public depends on an innate understanding of their changing and unmet needs. Design Thinking is an approach developed by Tim Brown, founder of IDEO innovation consultancy. At the heart of this approach is empathising with your user or key stakeholder, understanding how their world is today, and how it could be in the future. So spending more time researching your primary users’ views and experiences will quickly reveal new opportunities for improvement and innovation. For example, Hanover Housing Association, which manages homes for older people for multiple local authorities, conducted detailed research with their staff. They found that their employees knew little about dementia and that other residents had little empathy or patience with dementia sufferers. This led them to develop a range of solutions to improve their services for dementia patients, such as awareness campaigns, and training for staff and residents. 4. Stimulate the work environment The YouGov and Microsoft research showed that the three main obstacles to creative working were uninspiring workplaces (41 per cent), a stressful atmosphere (34 per cent) and a lack of appropriate spaces to focus (28 per cent).

The reality for most managers is that they spend their time fire fighting, working through their busy to-do list, and delivering short-term goals Managers can help shift this creative apathy by encouraging their team members to get out of the office, and take a walk in the fresh air. Incubating ideas is a key part of the creative process, so for extra challenging problems, giving people time to ‘sleep on it’ can actually be highly productive. In addition, exposing employees to talks, conferences and new sensory stimuli is great for sparking new ideas and improving motivation. For example, when Canadian Deputy Municipal Clerk Natasha Letchford saw a TED talk entitled The Antidote to Apathy, it inspired her to re-think the design of local government signs and notices in order to make them clearer. 5. Adopt an experimental mindset As the landscape of public service changes, what works today may not be the best solution for tomorrow. But doing things differently in a way that has never been done before is risky, which can invoke the fear of failure in some managers. Adopting an experimental mindset means testing concepts early and often. By making prototypes, sharing these with users and getting feedback, teams can

quickly learn what is working and what is not. Refining concepts in smaller stages reduces risk by converting potential failures into opportunities to learn. For example, Finland, where an experimental mindset is official government policy, systematically tests new policies, such as a basic income, before deciding whether to introduce them on a larger scale. As our world rapidly changes, so too will the demands and expectations citizens have of public services. To stay ahead of the curve, it’s crucial that managers and leaders foster a culture of innovation and creative thinking within their teams. Training courses can be useful for developing skills and capabilities, but to be most effective in practice, the workplace needs managers who are better innovators themselves. L

Gabriella Goddard is the coaching director at the Brainsparker Leadership Academy, specialising in developing innovation and creativity capabilities in the workplace. She is also a member of the Forbes Coaches Council. FURTHER INFORMATION www.brainsparkeracademy.com

Volume 25.5 | GOVERNMENT BUSINESS MAGAZINE

Digital

Easing the shift to digital services Nick Ford, technology evangelist at Mendix, discusses the barriers to digital transformation in the public sector and explains how Knowsley Council has overcome them Guided by the UK’s creation of the digital transformation is clear; certainly to Government Digital Service (GDS) in 2012, save on operational efficiency costs, but also there’s a huge drive for digital transformation to meet the evolving digital expectations of in both local and central government. The constituents. According to a survey conducted pursuit of digital in the public sector is by Ipsos for Sopra Steria, the vast majority of being driven by two factors; the need to citizens are ready and willing to use current operate within tightening budgets and a digital government services and additional requirement to meet the digital expectations services too, when they become available. of constituents. While pursuing digital transformation can be challenging enough Spending cuts for any organisation, public sector agencies and new approaches also find themselves competing with the However, the path to digital transformation private sector for top technical talent, when hasn’t been easy for councils and government given today’s IT skills shortages such talent departments. While the Ipsos study suggests is already hard to find and to keep. Current that 64 per cent of respondents find online approaches to software and application public services to be ‘advanced,’ public sector development are simply not maintainable spending cuts have hit IT departments if the digital goals of the public hard leaving them sometimes sector are to be met. struggling to maintain the Knowsle From a cost-per-transaction systems and applications y Council perspective a study of local they have now, let alone is targetin councils reported by the find the budget and BBC shows that face-toresources to develop cent of g 50 per transac face transactions cost new services. As a t to be o £8.62 (on average), in result, some digital nline by ions 2019 and is c contrast to £2.83 per transformation onfiden phone interaction and initiatives are being t o f approa only 15 pence for online held back. And ching 75 per transactions conducted via with IT staff salaries cent a website. With public sector typically lower than the by 202 spending budgets being so big numbers available 0 tight, the incentive for government to skilled staff in the private

sector, not just recruiting, but retaining talented developers can be a struggle. However, the good news is that new approaches to software development are easing the strain. Many councils and departments have discovered that the traditional process by which IT software development projects have been led, a methodology called ‘waterfall,’ does them few favours when it comes to innovating new digital versions of services. That’s because it relies on having a highly detailed requirements specification and often necessitates highly skilled coders for development work. Many have instead turned to a different process called ‘the agile methodology,’ that’s already well practiced in the private sector. Some too, have discovered ‘low-code’ visual modelling tools such as Mendix, a rapid application development approach which advances the agile approach in several key ways. Low-code supports collaboration. Within such platforms, the developer and a business user can view and understand the structure, logic and flow of an application. Lowcode platforms remove the technical code, translating it into graphical components and workflows that a wide spectrum of professionals can understand, from technical developers to business stakeholders. This allows people such as the developer and user to work together to hone an app for new ideas as they iterate towards a final working version. It’s a very fast process; an experienced low-code developer can build an application, including the user interface, in just five-10 per cent of the time that a skilled coder would need to write the same app. And because E Volume 25.5 | GOVERNMENT BUSINESS MAGAZINE

DO YOU KNOW WHO YOU’VE HIRED? MANY GOVERNMENT TENDERS REQUIRE C O N T R A C T S TA F F T O B E B P S S B A C K G R O U N D SCREENED - ARE YOU READY? Agenda Screening Services™ are proud to be named in the UK Government’s Baseline Personnel Security Standard which offers guidance on pre-employment screening of Civil Servants, members of the Armed Forces and Government contractors. The BPSS (Baseline Personnel Security Standard) is being used as a screening template by many organisations including Government departments, suppliers and agencies. BPSS compliant screening consists of four main components, creating the RICE acronym. Agenda build most screening levels with RICE forming the basis, ensuring clients are compliant with the Government’s BPSS.

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agile thinking are complemented by facilitating close collaboration between developers as the people who really understand the public service being digitised and the businesses and citizens who will use it. Applications can be developed via an easy-to-share graphical workflow process, towards meeting users’ evolving needs and government demands for digital innovation. The outcome is faster delivery, higher levels of user acceptance, improved engagement and reduced costs for local and central government departments. Case study - Knowsley Council The Metropolitan Borough of Knowsley near Liverpool is home to around 148,000 residents and is the base for some 2,700 businesses. Knowsley Council, a unitary authority, provides a full range of services, some 160 of them in fact, from emptying bins and looking after parks and highways, through to planning, and adults’ and children’s social care. It also collects council tax to fund such services. Knowsley is no stranger to local government spending cuts and the council has sought ways to serve its citizens more efficiently. Under a strategy it named ‘Channel Shift,’ the council has worked hard to develop the necessary application infrastructure to

Many authorities have discovered that the traditional process by which IT software development projects have been led, a methodology called ‘waterfall,’ does them few favours when it comes to innovating new digital versions of services

support digital transactions. It encourages citizens to engage via the Knowsley Council web portal where appropriate and it runs education sessions for the less digitally savvy in the benefits of being able to serve themselves online and how to do so. Following its agile development ethos, Knowsley Council created a low-code development team. A key benefit has been the ability to recruit from a much broader base. The council has engaged existing staff who understand the nuts, bolts and logic flows of a service and have the soft skills to be able to work in close collaboration with local citizens and businesses. Through this hybrid approach, which includes graduates and experienced development staff handling application integration, the speed of development has proven extremely fast, with some applications having taken just days or weeks to build and launch, when they would have taken months to develop using traditional programming languages. The ability to quickly and easily alter applications to accommodate feedback has brought the council the freedom to continually iterate and improve applications, further increasing value and satisfaction for users and therefore uptake numbers. As of March 2018, Knowsley had attracted local businesses and citizens to conduct some 35 per cent of all transactions online. That’s up from just two per cent or so of transactions back in 2013 and represents savings of approximately £350,000 per annum. The council is targeting 50 per cent of transactions to be online by 2019 and is confident of approaching 75 per cent by 2020. L

Digital

 low-code is such as fast development method, it’s a much more affordable approach for cash-strapped budgets as well as an enabler for meeting tight deadlines. Low-code approaches also mean that councils and government departments can rely less on recruiting (and keeping) top-end expensive coders; they can instead engage people as developers who understand the detailed logic of how a service works and who come with the soft skills to collaborate using visual workflows to build what’s right, first time, every time. Another benefit of low-code is that skilled coders can be released from basic development work and deployed to more technically challenging requirements. For example, to systems integration projects to improve the extent to which digital government services are ‘joined-up’ services rather than the silos that sometimes frustrate citizens. (Nobody likes to have to insert the very same personal information each and every time they access a different new government service). It is widely accepted that if used correctly, agile development can contribute to positive outcomes in application software development projects. When matched with the use of a low-code platform, the benefits of

FURTHER INFORMATION www.mendix.com

Volume 25.5 | GOVERNMENT BUSINESS MAGAZINE

Powering the digital economy EcostruxureTM is Schneider Electricâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s open IoT architecture and platform. Its ecosystem of 21,000 system integrators and developers, currently managing more than 1.5 million assets across Buildings, Data Centres, Infrastructure and industries, delivering enhanced value around safety, reliability, operational efficiency, sustainability and connectivity

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Smart Buildings Show

Tracking technology in the smart buildings industry The Smart Buildings Show, taking place at London’s Barbican on 7-8 November, will cover all key aspects of creating and managing a smart building. Government Business previews the show

The Smart Buildings Show aims to connect monitoring; networks and wireless; software; visitors to the latest information and services and support; building automation technology in the smart buildings industry, and design; building energy management; providing visitors with the information they and regulations and consultancy. need to arrive at an informed decision on how to make their buildings more economic for Smart buildings owners and more functional for occupiers. and the built environment Smart buildings deliver services that make As buildings become more connected, complex, occupants productive at the lowest cost and dynamic, there is a growing need for and environmental impact over the building intelligent building technologies that provide lifecycle. To do this requires adding intelligence data-driven insights to maximise operational from the design phase through to the end of efficiency, cut energy waste, and lower overall the building’s useful life. Smart costs. Furthermore, today’s smart buildings buildings use information are not only expected to interact Techno technology during with objects, but also improve operation to connect occupant comfort and experience exists to logy subsystems, which by interacting with people. e a s i l y allow e typically operate How can organisations produc xisting independently, so that – whether they’re large t s these systems can multi-national entities or their da to expose t share information small to medium-sized a t o i n the ternet a to optimise total businesses – best integrate n building performance. IoT to deliver significant part of d become a Smart buildings transformation over time? ecosyst wider look beyond the The ‘Smart Buildings – Interfacing e m building equipment People, Technology, and the Built within their four walls. They Environment’ presentation, hosted by are connected and responsive Pradyumna Pandit, explores how smart and they interact with building operators buildings leverage the Internet of Things (IoT) and occupants to give them new levels of to create new opportunities for information visibility and actionable information. gathering and sharing, and the impact it has To improve knowledge and challenge on buildings management, operations, and perceptions of smart buildings, the Smart occupant experience. The presentation will Buildings Show will cover: building automation also showcase a case study of what that systems; energy efficiency; lighting and ideal building in today’s world can look like. controls; security; HVAC; smart meters and Buildings are going through a continuous

transformation enabled by the IoT technologies such as predictive maintenance, data analytics, cloud and mobile applications. These technologies are revolutionising the building automation systems, from energy management to space usage, occupant comfort, facility management and even the HVAC. The convergence of technologies already delivers tangible business outcomes by reducing the operating costs and improving the occupant experience. This trend will significantly grow in the years to come and it will totally transform the building industry. On a short run, predicting how an organisation’s operating costs will change from week to week or month to month is no easy feat. Tight budgets leave little room for unexpected surprises, and while recent periods of low-wage growth and stable energy costs have helped ease the management burden, these trends will not last forever. Facility managers and business leaders should assess ways of better managing variability. To do this, they should use a wealth of data available from today’s building systems. IoT-enabled connectivity makes this possible, but the insight gained analysing statistics tied to repairs, operations, space usage, occupancy levels and energy performance and costs is key. These insights, shared by Honeywell’s Paul Mason, can help drive automated actions that solve real business issues and drive more outcomes from a facility. What’s essential is aligning these to the business operations and making the facilities your organisation operates in, positively impact your bottom line. E Volume 25.5 | GOVERNMENT BUSINESS MAGAZINE

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Smart Buildings Show

 The main reason enterprises fail to implement IoT is complexity. What’s needed for IoT to become as easy as consumer technologies? Why is Bluetooth Low Energy the key driver of this shift? This session, held by Phillip von Gilsa, will answer these questions and showcase successful implementations of safety and security, asset tracking, and condition monitoring solutions in buildings. Smart Buildings in 2025 In 2025 newly constructed smart buildings will be designed to enhance the productivity of building users, deliver more sophisticated energy management and maximise space utilisation. But what will the technology ecosystem to manage smart buildings look like? This presentation, run by Susan Clarke, will draw on recent Verdantix research studies into building technologies to share two likely scenarios for the future development of technology ecosystems for smart buildings. In this session delegates will consider the role for IoT platforms, facilities optimisation software, artificial intelligence, smart equipment, workplace apps, robots and other technologies. Real estate investors, property developers, facilities managers, product manufacturers and technology vendors should attend this session to get an independent perspective into the range of technologies that will infuse smart buildings of the future. Workplace technology can facilitate greater levels of collaboration and innovation, but to succeed you need to start with people. In his facilities management seminar, Peter Brogan, senior research and insights manager, looks at how tech can transform workplace productivity but also the ever changing world of facilities management. Training Hubs The Training Hub at Smart Buildings Show will have a selection of presentations that will enable attendees to top up their CPD accreditation or simply enhance their professional qualifications and knowledge. The first training hub session will focus on IoT in buildings. There is much confusion and ambiguity surrounding

Smart buildings use information technology during operation to connect subsystems, which typically operate independently, so that these systems can share information to optimise total building performance the meaning of the IoT and its function and possible uses within buildings. This course, led by Karl Walker, will detail what - and what doesn’t - constitute an IoT product, explain how IoT devices work, and highlight the security implications of connecting devices to the internet. It will also discuss the practical uses for IoT in buildings and how smart buildings rely on this technology to connect disparate pieces of equipment to form an integrated control solution that can reduce energy costs, ensure occupier comfort, optimise the utilisation of space and assist facilities management with predictive maintenance. Many people do not realise that legacy devices and equipment don’t have to be excluded from an IoT solution; technology

exists to easily allow existing products to expose their data to the internet and become part of a wider ecosystem, with new devices being simply added without concern for compatibility or being tied to manufacturerspecific systems. Practical examples will be given of how IoT can be implemented within an everyday building control solution. IoT promises greater business value through increased connectivity and data analytics. However, with greater connectivity comes an increased vulnerability to cyber attacks. With technologies evolving in both streams, attackers are leveraging more sophisticated means to gain access to information. Cyber security should, therefore, be a holistic part of company culture. There’s no point in securing systems, if the building is not secure. And every network and connected device must be protected. Victor Lough’s presentation, also part of the Training Hub feature, aims to educate the audience on the trends in IoT, which whilst bringing us huge benefits, also bring additional concerns in the area of cyber attacks. There will be a brief overview on the types and effects of attacks, some real world examples, and some analysis of the associated costs. The presentation then discusses how we can tackle this through cyber security, some of the features to watch out for when choosing system components, and then get into specifics of how building management systems can still bring the benefits of open systems, whilst being hardened to the threat of cyber attacks as much as possible. L FURTHER INFORMATION www.smartbuildingsshow.com

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Workforce

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CIPD Conference

CIPD: Leading the people profession

to answer the question of how people professionals can help promote a positive employee experience while embedding effective people management practices. Delegates will discover new ways of approaching employee engagement, well-being and inclusion strategies.

The key to success Rachel Botsman, best-selling author of ‘Who can you trust?’ and lecturer at The biggest professional issues of our time, the new role of the University of Oxford will deliver the the people profession, and how to effectively drive good work opening keynote on ‘the new era of trust’ and why it is key to success. Focusing and good business will be discussed at the 71st CIPD Annual on the importance of embedding trust Conference and Exhibition into the culture of organisations, she will explore how the new concept of trust has reshaped success, the importance of being trustworthy to drive innovation, and how to attract and retain great talent. Sir Lenny Henry CBE, comedian and actor, will deliver the closing keynote on the importance of diversity and true inclusion. Drawing on his own personal and professional experiences, he will talk about why the people profession, employers and society as a whole needs to start demanding more action on diversity and inclusion. Peter Cheese, CIPD chief executive, comments: “This year, so far, has proven to be a crucial year for the people profession. Changing policy demands such as gender The pay gap reporting confere n and GDPR have c e is desig seen organisations n e d to enab increasingly turning to the HR function profess le people i o to provide clarity n a l s to develop and guidance. As t h e skills needed the voice of our profession grows a rapid to evolve in ly cha stronger, it’s crucial world o nging that we build on f this momentum by work expanding and developing our own skills. With the world of work constantly The CIPD, the professional body for HR and Strategic HR & Ethical Decision Making will evolving, our ability to innovate, make people development, has announced the look at how people professionals can create decisions, and champion working lives more programme for its 71st Annual Conference an impact within organisations, examining broadly becomes even more essential. and Exhibition, taking place at Manchester “This year’s Annual Conference and how to evolve and develop the skills Central on 7- 8 November 2018. The major HR Exhibition will explore how the people needed to create a higher strategic impact event of the year, attracting thousands of UK at work. The second stream, Organisational profession can lead change within their based and international attendees, the theme Development & Business Effectiveness, will own organisations against a backdrop of for this year’s event is ‘leading the people teach how people professionals can help wider change and evolution in the world profession’, with the conference designed to organisations progress and develop, how to of work. We’re excited to be bringing you enable people professionals to develop the help shift organisational cultures, and manage a programme designed to develop futureskills and capabilities needed to evolve in a the expectations of multiple generations at fit core skills, understand the impact of rapidly changing world of work and become work. The Technology & The Future of Work technologies on the future of work, and a strategic force within their organisations. will question the impact of technology and become an effective, strategic force within Thought-leaders, academics and practitioners AI on the wider world of work, asking what it your business context. With a range of will share practical knowledge through means for people professionals. Delegates will workshops, case studies, panel discussions keynotes, case studies and sprint sessions on learn how to enable evidence-based HR, as and ethical debates happening over the two how people professionals can lead the way in well as their own digital and analytics skill set. days and a line-up of brilliant minds bringing driving good work and good business. In Talent, Skills & Capabilities, delegates us the very latest thinking and practice, The conference sessions will cover five will explore the most effective methods you’ll discover how best to lead change key streams: Strategic HR & Ethical Decision to recruit and retain the best talent for and champion better work and working Making; Organisational Development your organisation and discover how to lives within your own organisation.” L & Business Effectiveness; Technology develop effective leaders, line managers & The Future of Work; Talent, Skills & and embed a culture of continuous learning. FURTHER INFORMATION Capabilities; and Employee Experience, The final stream, Employee Experience, Well-being & People Management. Well-being & People Management, seeks https://events.cipd.co.uk/events/annual

Volume 25.5 | GOVERNMENT BUSINESS MAGAZINE

Libraries Written by Ian Anstice, Public Libraries News

The avenues of opportunity available at your library You hear library and you instantly think cuts and closures. But, as Ian Anstice explains, there are plenty of examples of where innovation and investment are making a difference Public libraries are undergoing something time and be blown away by the marble and of a renaissance worldwide. The number of mosaics. Then go upstairs and catch a game visitors is increasing in countries as large of table football, play on the free piano (not a as the USA and as far away as Australia. In grand, alas, in this case) or talk about how to these countries, investment and imagination make a profit at the British Library Business are making libraries real living rooms for and Intellectual Property Centre based there. the community, with the buildings having Or go to StoryHouse in Chester and catch a luxurious sofas to relax in, technology to top-notch play before having a meal in the borrow and even a baby grand piano or restaurant and borrowing a book from the two. To celebrate a century of independence, shelves lining the walls, while your children Finland did not erect a statue. No, they built have a story read to them in the den. These a big new library fittingly called ‘Ode’. are beautiful places, as good as any that In a country of 5.5 million people, the rest of the world has to offer. the €98 million investment And the number of visitors S pendin will make sure that the there can be double the has a d g 68 million books issued same figure ten years ago. annually there will only The impact of the impact irect on libra increase in the future, internet has naturally u s e, as th r with immeasurable meant fewer reference e reduc y benefits for literacy t in fund ion enquiries – librarians and the economy. don’t get asked for visitors ing and Meanwhile, in England, the population of in too m an there are some superb France as much – but parts of the UK y new libraries now available it has also led to a great show for all. Some of these deal of people needing approach being palaces. Visit to use computers. Libraries Manchester Central Library some see thousands of jobseekers,

BUSINESS INFORMATION FOR LOCAL AND CENTRAL GOVERNMENT | www.governmentbusiness.co.uk

each year, who need to have online access. In addition, these people often need help setting up an email address and how to look for work. That’s where the library on the street corner comes in. Senior citizens come in and want to contact their far-flung families as well. The computers and assistance that a well-funded library, with trained staff, can give these people are immense. Wi-Fi is free in almost all libraries – although it could be made a lot easier to access in a few – and there’s a move towards wireless printing too. Speaking of technology, there has been an explosion in code clubs for children in libraries, with the basics being led for a technologically literate society in years to come. And in these days of Fake News, there’s a real and expanding role for public libraries in teaching people how to work things out for themselves, by teaching them how to untangle propaganda from reality. One of the things about public libraries is how much they change while seeming to be the same to those who walk by. There weren’t many computers knocking around there in the 1990s, yes, but the change is also in other, more subtle, ways. For instance, there

So, what about ebooks? Surely that means the day of the library has gone? Well, ebook usage is slowing for a start. It’s around a fifth, just a fifth, of the marketplace for books, and its proportional growth, by some measures, has almost stopped. Even on trains, full of people with money and tech, it’s common to see someone reading a printed book. But most reading is not done on trains. Reading is more of a domestic activity and, there, it appears, people prefer paper. And, with a new hardback book costing sometimes £20 plus, obtaining the title at the library either for free or for a small reservation fee makes a lot of sense. Someone said somewhere that libraries provide more books that are actually read than all the bookshops combined, online or not. This is because libraries provide books that people actually want to read while a fair proportion of books bought – and Christmas is a dominating time of year – are for presents and are often left unread. But, having said that, it’s a rare library service nowadays that does not offer e-books for free.

Libraries

are thousands, literally thousands, of reading groups attached to libraries now compared to almost none 20 years ago. Libraries don’t only provide space for these people but also space and books. And reading groups come in a wide variety. It’s not all Richard and Judy. There are groups for health and wellbeing, with attenders being encouraged to read out loud and make new friends. There are also conversation groups for those who do not have English as a second language. Libraries are ideal for this. They’re not as scary as a college or a clinic and they’re everywhere, with over 5,000 in the UK. And there is such variety too. One of the most awesome things recently has been the expansion of children reading to dogs. Yes, dogs. It works: the dog is patient, sits and just looks on. The child has a non-judgemental listener and looks forward to seeing the dog. Librarians are already looking at expanding this further. Do not be surprised if your library starts offering a coffee morning shortly with a dog in attendance for those who miss having a dog at home some point soon. And if you think that is cute, well, let me explain toy sleepovers. This is where a child drops off a favourite teddy overnight and the library takes photos of it playing with other toys in the library, perhaps having a story read to them or being tucked into bed. The child then comes to collect the toy a day or two later and is presented with photos of what the toy got up to, along with a suggested book the toy ‘enjoyed’ while it was away. Very few people do sweet combined literacy as well as an imaginative library staff.

One of the keys to understanding library use is that library use is function of how much time people have and how much money they possess. If you have no time and lots of money then a public library is blatantly not for you. You will buy what you want and avoid taking the time out of your doubtless busy life to visit the library or jump a hurdle of two to borrow online. Good for you. It must be nice being such a small proportion of the population. Public libraries have never been for those people, except in the most enlightened sense that they provide equality of access to information, community and imagination for everyone else. This is, after all, why they were set up in the first place. The hard-nosed Victorians did not create them because they were nice people. Victorians were, by and large, not lefty liberals. No, they did it for sound economic and social reasons, to provide education and avenues of opportunity to those who would be less useful otherwise. So, this whole article has not mention budget cuts or library closures once. Read elsewhere if you want to know about the very real problems that those are causing. That’s because I wanted to give you a guide

Libraries see thousands of jobseekers, each year, who need to have online access. In addition, these people often need help setting up an email address and how to look for work

to what a library could be and, if well-funded, is. But spending has a direct impact on library use, as the reduction in funding and visitors in too many parts of the UK show. All else being equal, the more time and less money you have, the more likely you are to use the library. The local branch does not charge per hour or look askance at someone studying all day or chatting with friends without buying a cappuccino. This makes it ideal for the child, the parent, the jobseeker and the retired. But, also, something else is at play. Remember the examples at the start of the Finnish library and Manchester or Chester? Well, those are places with a lot of investment and so they’re beautiful places to visit. The more attractive you make a library, the more likely those with less time and more money will go in. If you can serve a good coffee in beautiful surroundings, with free activities for the kids, you can get an upper middle class library, as the Scandinavians have proved so well over the decades. And the best library is one that is there truly for everyone, with all of the imaginative activities in full swing. Plus a quiet easy chair. And a book. That should not be out of the question for a country as wealthy as the UK. Especially if want to keep it as prosperous as it is now. Or those countries spending more, oh so much more, than us on libraries will get further ahead. And, one day, you may find yourself, too, with lots of time and not much money … and not have a library near you. L FURTHER INFORMATION www.publiclibrariesnews.com

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Taking place over two days in Excel London, LuxLive 2018 is the unmissable event for anyone in the lighting industry Revo Media Partners Limited, organisers of the annual LuxLive lighting event, claim that the 2018 iteration of the show is due to be the largest and busiest event of its series, with in excess of 50 per cent more visitors already registered to attend. LuxLive 2018 features eight inspiring conference tracks and over 100 expert speakers, covering crucial topics including emergency lighting, safer cities, lighting for transport and infrastructure, workplace and wellbeing lighting, as well as many more. In this short preview, we look at three of those streams: Lighting for Workplace and Wellbeing; the Safer Cities Conference; and the Emergency Lighting Conference. Health productive buildings Despite conventional wisdom, workplaces are deceptively difficult places to light well. They are also one of the few categories of lighting with solid restrictions on light level and do’s and don’ts. Few will suffer if your building façade is lit to 20 lux not 50; make a similar mistake in the workplace and you could have a lawsuit. This conference will show you how to create great spaces that boost productivity and well-being. Luke Price, senior radiation protection scientist at Public Health England, will use his opening session presentation to discuss CIE’s new international standard CIE DIS 026:2018 on the metrology for the health and well-being aspects of exposure to light. This is one step in a process expected to have wide-ranging consequences for lighting specialists and researchers. Also speaking on the morning of 15 November, BRE’s Cosmin Ticleanu will look at the light levels and assessment of daylight in the existing space, and objectives of the post-refurbishment phase. The Biophilic Office is a two-year research and demonstration project, currently underway, investigating how office refurbishment measures inspired by biophilic design principles can improve occupant productivity and wellness. Making cities safer Lighting has long been a tool in the fight against anti-social behaviour, vandalism, crime and suicides in our cities. But increasingly we are beginning to understand that brighter lighting is not always better; it’s the intelligent application of lighting – both static and dynamic – that is creating the real breakthroughs and leading to reductions in both crime and the fear of crime in our urban environments. The opening session in this stream will be held by Eddie Henry, principal lighting engineer for Hackney Borough Council, who will examine crime and the fear of crime in cities with a focus on spatial dimensions, the socio-factors and how local authorities and communities can respond. Other local authority speakers include Hannah Brookshaw, regeneration manager at Hastings Borough Council, who will present on the Bottle Alley Exemplar Project in Hastings. Lighting has transformed an unsafe and poorly-lit seaside promenade into a spectacular attraction in Hastings. The 1/2 kilometre long Bottle Alley,

LuxLive 2018

Discovering innovation in the lighting industry

once a magnet for anti-social behaviour, now draws tourists and resident alike with a daily LED light show. The impact of the lighting is such that it’s now being studied by other towns as a cost-effective ‘intervention’ in problem urban areas. Emergency lighting in buildings Are you accountable for the emergency lighting in your buildings? If so, you’ll know what a big responsibility it is to ensure that your staff and customers are safe at all times. As the ‘responsible person’ under the Fire Safety Act, it’s also down to you to manage the risk assessments, testing, maintenance and all the associated documentation. Technology has driven significant change in emergency lighting in recent times, including internet connectivity and the development of ‘dynamic signage systems’. Innovation isn’t without risk and there is a need for common standards to ensure compliance and ultimately safe products. Learn how you can future-proof your product investment to keep pace with innovation whilst safeguarding your brand and reputation with the help go Graham McKay, global head of electrical products at BSI. Speaking on 15 November, Ian Watt’s, of the Fire Industry Association, looks at the current situation in emergency lighting and how this is developing. He will touch on the lux levels and guidance for key applications and what to consider with the dynamic safety signage system. There will also be a emergency lighting panel discussion, looking at the role of lighting in the Internet of Things. Industry experts are predicting that the lighting will soon be part of the so-called ‘Internet of Things’ where various services in buildings communicate and are controlled via an Internet-Protocol network. Emergency lighting is well placed to benefit from this trend and in theory this could make the monitoring and regular testing of the installation easier. The panel, including Philips OEM Technology’s Peter Earle and the BSI’s David Mudd, debates the merits of IoT-connected emergency lighting. L FURTHER INFORMATION https://luxlive.co.uk

SMART LIGHTING SOLUTIONS WITH MAXIMUM BENEFITS Streets and parks

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Volume 25.5 | GOVERNMENT BUSINESS MAGAZINE Lumenia.indd 1

28. 08. 2018 10:42:32

FEATURE HEADING Written by

Heading Taking health on two andor three lines safetyason tight theas road possible please

All companies running any size of fleet have a legal obligation and a duty of care to their drivers. When your place of workquam extends beyond the officeetoret, business premises, so too does your Udae nonsend icidisquid elisimincim facepro sed responsibility to ut provide a safe for your employees quodi blaborum molorem aut‘mobile’ ationse environment nos eumque laboribus et quoditiat dolo qui de volecab orerisqui nitibusdae nullacianti rest, sitiatis ut idem quodi consequat facimagnime pernatemquae nimusFleet earibus, temknow ipsaest moluptatium net et Daimler Management that their Optimisedes Assistance responsibility goes beyond simply funding and procuring your vehicles, taking an active xoxoxoxo role in shaping a policy that fulfils your duty of care requirements to your drivers. SUBHEADERS L We’ve listed some of the areas to consider when drawing up your duty of care policies. FURTHER INFORMATION Drivers: xxx You wouldn’t allow an employee to use complicated machinery without being given sufficient training, yet many companies send their drivers on the road without specific safety training.

Driver Training Using a simple online driver assessment tool DFM will help you to identify which drivers are most in need of training. Delivered through eLearning and classroom training DFM will provide at risk drivers with tuition in hazard awareness and speeding, and with driving behaviours and concentration techniques. Additionally, drivers can also be taught to drive more economically and shown what to do in the event of a breakdown or collision, minimising downtime and keeping your people safe. Driver licence checks Research has shown that less than 15 per cent of motorists would inform their employer if they had a driving offence or penalty points on their licence. The burden of performing licence checks can be lessened with by automated checks carried out by DFM. You’ll receive up-todate information on your drivers, that DFM source directly from the DVLA. You choose the regularity of the checks and alongside the online assessments, you can monitor and retrain the drivers identified as being at risk. Vehicles: Automotive technology is improving all of the time. Investing in new vehicles means you are not only surrounding your drivers with the most innovative safety features, your business will also benefit from the latest in-car functionality aimed at greater driver efficiency. In-built technology comes as standard in many cars and vans these days. For example:

Predicts and manages maintenance and repairs. Fleet managers can also receive alerts of safety critical events.

Driving Style Analytics Provides data on each user’s driving style to encourage safer and more cost-effective driving. Fatigue Alerts Audible prompts encourage the driver to take a break after prolonged periods on the road. In addition to lane tracking technology and hazard alerts some vehicles also monitor your position in the driving seat and look out for tell-tale signs of tiredness. Improved Navigation More efficient navigation information derived from a variety of sources can help avoid busy roads and traffic incidents. Almost all of these features and many more will interface straight into your own internal IT systems, providing valuable insight into the workings of your fleet and the training needs of your drivers. Fleet Management: Whether it’s an on or off balance-sheet solution that you are looking for DFM have a product to suit your needs. A periodic vehicle change cycle will minimise the chance of mechanical risks occurring. These risks can be further mitigated by a robust fleet management policy.

Fleet Consultancy Help choosing the most suitable and cost effective vehicles for your business is vital - ‘the right priced’ vehicle may not be the most appropriate one. It’s important to partner with a fleet management supplier who takes the time to understand your mobility objectives before recommending which vehicles you should take. By undertaking a whole life cost analysis you’ll see the true cost of running a fleet and the total cost of operating vehicles over their lifetime. Service and Maintenance Regular, manufacturer approved service and maintenance packages ensure

BUSINESS INFORMATION FOR LOCAL AND CENTRAL GOVERNMENT | www.governmentbusiness.co.uk

that your vehicles deliver optimum performance with downtime due to mechanical errors minimised.

Accident Management Supporting your drivers when they need it most. Your priority will always be to the welfare of your driver, an effective accident management product will ensure that they are safe and taken care of as quickly and suitably as possible. Attention can then be focused on the swift recovery and repair of your company vehicle. The administrative burden is taken care of on your behalf and if repairs are lengthy, an appropriate courtesy vehicle can be supplied, keeping your business moving. If a driver is involved in an accident that could have been prevented the company may find they are liable. A comprehensive duty of care strategy as outlined will illustrate that every care has been taken to protect your drivers, meaning if the worst does happen you will be able to focus on what’s important – your driver’s welfare and your business’ continuity. L FURTHER INFORMATION Tel: 01908 697442 dfm-uk@daimler.com daimlersixty.co.uk

If the idea of saving up to 80 per cent on your company fuel bill sounds like something you could get on board with, then consider switching your fleet to electric. Jump ahead of the game, flaunt your low carbon footprint to clients and avoid road tax, whilst providing your drivers with a smooth and clean day-to-day vehicle experience. With battery ranges ever increasing, using electric vehicles (EVs) as your everyday company vehicles is a more realistic goal than ever. The Energy Saving Trust have put together the following guide to meeting your business needs using EVs. Consider daily driving patterns When choosing the correct EV, consider your drivers’ daily route patterns. Older model EVs can have ranges from 80 miles, whilst newer models with larger batteries, such as the 2018 40kw Nissan Leaf, can do over 170 miles on a single charge. Also consider locations in which your vehicles are likely to have downtime, for example the driver’s lunch stops or times when the driver is engaged in a non-driving activity. Are these close to public charge points? Will drivers touch base much throughout the day to top up vehicles? Will you even use the entire range in one day? These factors largely depend on your business type and area of coverage, but if you’re staying in and around the city then perhaps installing slower chargers at your base for overnight charging would be the most sensible method.

asessment by the Energy Saving Trust. If you run a fleet of company cars, consider pushing your employees to make the most of the EST domestic chargepoint grant. Up to £300 of grant funding is available per household from Energy Saving Trust, which tops up the £500 available from the Office for Low Emission Vehicles. This usually covers the full cost of parts and installation. Making use of home charging and topping up via a growing network of rapid chargers, company vehicle drivers should be able to go about their business relatively unhindered by the constraints of having to charge – particularly if they’re operating in cities. Find available charge points in your area using chargeplacescotland. org, or chargeyourcar.org.uk. The cost savings Consider the cost saving. Government grants applied to EVs at point of purchase help ensure the cost of an EV are comparable with that of an internal combustion vehicle, and when you consider the fuel saving over a sixyear period the financial benefits of running an EV fleet are clear. Maintenance costs, for one, can be reduced by as much as 70 per cent compared to that of a petrol or diesel vehicle. With electricity costing significantly

If y run a flou compan eet of conside y cars, your em r pushing p the ESTloyees to use d chargepomestic oin grant t

Written by Emily Stone, assistant programme manager for electrification, Energy Saving Trust

With battery ranges ever increasing and a pledge from the government to improve the charging infrastructure, having electric vehicles on your fleet is a more realistic goal than ever. But there are still things to consider. Emily Stone explains

Fleet management

What to consider before going electric?

less than petrol and diesel, you can expect to save around 80 per cent on fuel with an EV. For example, a 2008 VW Golf TDI completing 12,000 miles a year would cost the owner more than £10,100 in fuel and tax over this six-year period. Compare this to an e-Golf, and the driver expects to save £7,625 and – more shockingly – an enormous 18 tonnes of tailpipe Co2 emissions. The above information was calculated using an Energy Saving Trust Vehicle Comparison Report (VCR), which is a free service available to all customers in Scotland. To obtain a VCR for one or more of your existing vehicles or to request more information on what vehicle type may suit your needs, call the Energy Saving Trust Transport Advice line on 0800 0931 669. In addition to the fuel savings, purchasing a new ultra-low emission vehicle (ULEV) through EST’s interest-free business loan may also save you money. The loan, which offers businesses in Scotland up to £120,000 (£35,000 per vehicle), interest-free over six years, can be used to purchase any new ULEV. For eligibility criteria and T&Cs, please contact to speak to your local transport advisor on 0800 0931 669. Please note this advice service is only available for businesses either registered within Scotland, or to the branches of a wider business which operate in Scotland. With an abundance of options for chargepoint and vehicle funding, 2018 provides the perfect time to flip the switch over to electric within your business. Jumping ahead of the inevitable electric vehicle game that will play out over the next decade and beyond is a sure-fire way to make the most of currently available funding opportunities, and to future-proof your business. Save money, save carbon and set an example to your competitors. L

This article first appeared in GreenFleet 116, which was published at the end of July. FURTHER INFORMATION www.energysavingtrust.org.uk

Commercial considerations If you run a fleet of vans, you will also need to consider the maximum payload you will be carrying. Existing models of electric van, due to the mass of the battery, cannot be loaded as heavily as ICE vans. Need you await the arrival of newer LCVs with increased load capacity, or can you get away with carrying smaller loads and midday trip back to the depot to collect the other half of the workload and stop for a quick recharge? Workplace charging Concerned about the extra cost of charging infrastructure? You could actually get a grant to cover up to 100 per cent of your workplace charge point, depending on

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Delivering far reaching outcomes, not just technology.

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A history of public sector procurement: recalling the cloud

G-Cloud

sponsored by

For use by the UK public sector to buy cloud computing services covering hosting, software and cloud support on a commodity based, pay-as-you go service, the G-Cloud frameworks have been helping public procurement since 2012. Here, we recall the steps that have been taken In August, the Crown Commercial Service covers cloud software (software as a service announced that the commercial G-Cloud - SaaS) applications, typically accessed over 10 agreement had gone live, albeit a few the internet or private network and hosted months later than originally planned, in the cloud. Lastly, in Lot 3, covering cloud meaning that public sector bodies could support to help you set up and maintain choose and purchase cloud computing your cloud software or hosting services. services covering infrastructure, platform, software and specialist cloud services. Cloud First policy The commodity-based, pay-as-you go Through the introduction of agreement runs for 12 months. the Cloud First policy, the However, as with previous government confirmed in G -Cloud iterations, the duration 2013 that purchases brings a may be extended for any through the cloud should step change period up to a maximum be the first option of 12 months from considered by public govern in the way m e expiry of the initial sector buyers of IT n t buys IT. It’s quic term, which is set for products and services. k e r , cheap and mo 1 August 2019. As In a bid to drive e r re com detailed in our last wider adoption of p e a t nd offe itive issue of Government rs Business at the end of choice more August, benefits of the innovatand agreement include access ion to nearly 25,000 services and 3,500 suppliers, as well as scalable services which can be expanded or shrunk as demand requires. G-Cloud 10 comprises 3 lots. Lot 1 is for cloud hosting, with both infrastructure and platform as a service (IaaS and PaaS) services that can help you do at least one of: deploy, manage and run software; and provision and use processing, storage or network resources. Lot 2

cloud computing in the public sector, Francis Maude, Minister for the Cabinet Office, said that public sector organisations should consider and fully evaluate potential cloud solutions first when procuring new or existing services. This approach is mandated to central government and strongly recommended to the wider public sector. Departments remained free to choose an alternative to the cloud if they could demonstrate that it offers better value for money. Maude said: “G-Cloud brings a step change in the way government buys IT. It’s quicker, cheaper and more competitive, open to a wider range of companies, including a majority of SMEs, and offers more choice and innovation. “Many government departments already use G-Cloud, but IT costs are still too high. One way we can reduce them is to accelerate the adoption of cloud across the public sector to maximise its benefits. The Cloud First policy will embed the skills a modern civil service needs to meet the demands of 21st-century digital government and help us get ahead in the global race.” E

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Delladene CloudStore, where collaboration begins. Government bodies need to move fast to a modernised approach for collaborating. For too long email has been the common method of collaboration but has proven to be insecure and difficult to manage and control. Large files, many recipients and disjointed messages create chaos. Through the use of a cloud-based solution for rapid and seamless adoption, Delladene CloudStore allows our customers to share, store and synchronise their work for better collaboration and security. Delladene is a cloud software supplier for the Crown Commercial Serviceâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s G-Cloud 10 framework. Public sector bodies can now easily select Delladene CloudStore as a G-Cloud solution, allowing them to try the solution before deciding if it is right for them. CloudStore helps solve the following problems for government bodies: Project collaboration without the aggravation of rigid project management Our secure solution enables you to collaborate on project related files across small or extended remote teams. File version control is maintained so everyone is on the same page. Keep control, who can do what Strong permissions model allows for teams to retain control of who gets to not only view, but edit, download, print or even share documents. Trust but verify A full audit log allows you to check who accessed what and when, including view confirmation information.

Store, Sync and Share files for better collaboration. Audit history and permissions for secure access.

Quick safe share Ever wished you could quickly and easily share single file or folder with someone, without calling IT? Quick-share capability allows you to provide a secure share. With quick-share you can control how many times someone can view, edit or download, all with the push of a button. Safe upload If you have ever asked someone to send you a document that contains personal or private information, email is not a secure way to transmit this type of information. CloudStore allows you to host your own secure inbox, so secure documents do not fly through insecure emails. Back-up your data Worried about losing your data? CloudStore agent can synchronise files and folders to a secure storage area. Remote access is controlled through security for retrieval if you have a disk failure. Link your scanner Want to reduce your carbon impact by reducing paper? Simply scan your documents on your office scanner/copier and watch them appear in your CloudStore document cabinet.

To learn more, visit our website at www.delladene.com/govbiz and claim your free G-Cloud trial today or call us on 01908 870010

BUSINESS INFORMATION FOR LOCAL AND CENTRAL GOVERNMENT | www.governmentbusiness.co.uk

 The start of the cloud In February 2012 the CloudStore was launched, marking a big step change in the way that suppliers and buyers do business on ICT services in the public sector. Operating like an App Store, it meant that a full selection of over 1,700 services, from some 257 suppliers, became available for everyone to see in a user friendly and easily searchable catalogue. In his blog post detailing the launch, Chris Chant, programme director for the programme, who then retired that following April, said that CloudStore was very much just the first version of the organisation’s plans for cloud procurement, suggesting that it would possibly be seen in the future as the ‘Alpha release’. Even whilst celebrating its launch, Chant and his team were already looking ahead to the next version of the G-Cloud framework, writing that he was aiming to make developments that were ‘more dynamic, allowing monthly refreshes to bring onboard new services or new suppliers’, and make high speed change possible. Just before announcing his retirement, Chant wrote in a blog on the government’s G-Cloud website that chief information officers (CIOs) and fellow civil servants were ‘hiding behind the comfort blanket’ and had to change how they buy IT. Citing himself as an example, Chant said IT leaders had been taking the ‘easy path’ for years, by agreeing expensive contracts with big IT suppliers, therefore ‘failing to innovate and thereby causing end users to suffer’. Chant was not only the only one criticising methods. Despite the G-Cloud plan calling for 50 per cent of new government IT spending to move to cloud computing services by 2015, and aiming to reduce government IT costs by £200 million per year, a report released in May 2012 claimed that the government may miss its cloud computing targets because of a lack of enthusiasm from public sector IT staff. CloudStore prided itself in its infancy on making it cheaper and easier for public sector organisations

G-Cloud

sponsored by

Despite calling for 50 per cent of new government IT spending to move to cloud computing services by 2015, a May 2012 report claimed that the government may miss its targets because of a lack of enthusiasm from public sector IT staff to choose and buy ‘off the shelf’ IT services, such as email, word processing, enterprise resource planning and electronic records management, but Smart Savings 3, G-Cloud Progress, commissioned by VMware, showcased how 59 per cent of the IT staff surveyed for the report said they were undecided on whether to use CloudStore to buy cloud services. The main reasons were fears for being tied in to existing contracts, concerns about security and a lack of understanding about cloud technologies.

Improvements and further innovation The Home Office’s Denise McDonagh took over from Chant at the start of May 2012, with G-Cloud team planning to launch the second version of the cloud within that time frame (Gii). The change would incorporate a new approach where the department would be able to add new suppliers and services on a quarterly basis at a minimum. Built as part of the Government E-Marketplace and using an existing government platform, the catalogue E

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 was still made up of the services from the first iteration and included the services from the first round of the G-Cloud OJEU. In mid-May, the benefits for buyers were outlined as improved search engine capabilities that allowed for free form search alongside the ability to filter on G-Cloud attributes, plus the ability to view supplier service definitions, terms and conditions, rate cards and other useful documents, compare services and standard configuration prices side by side, and purchase through the store (if you’re registered to use the eMarketplace). For suppliers, it meant the ability to make changes to CloudStore entry directly, a more open and fairer marketplace through side by side service comparisons, and quicker and easier payments. Furthermore, the value of the total procurement possible through Gii was increased from £60 million to £100 million and would run for 12 months not six. Although the limit of the contracts remained 12 months, contracts could run up to 24 months in exceptional circumstances. Once it opened for business, Gii had over 3,000 services available from 458 suppliers, double that of the first version. Of the 458 suppliers, 75 per cent were SMEs, a key part of making supplying to government simpler and opening up a more competitive marketplace. The first agreement, Gi, closed on 13 November 2012.

G-Cloud

sponsored by

By September 2013, there were over 800 suppliers, 83 per cent of this being SMEs, as well as more than 7,000 services, and an impressive £44.7 million in sales 63 per cent of these contracts were agreed with SMEs

Covering buyer needs The government announced that it would be carrying out a review of the effectiveness of government ICT framework agreements in October 2012, meaning that all new planned frameworks, including proposals for Giii, were paused. At the start of 2013, the green light was given to G-Cloud. Both the G-Cloud framework and the CloudStore celebrated their first birthday in February 2013, although plans to produce Giii by April are already looking unlikely to be met. McDonagh again reiterated that G-Cloud was ‘a game changer for the way government buys, manages, delivers and operates IT’. Discussing 12 months of operations, Francis Maude said: “In just 12 months, G-Cloud has shown itself to be a model for efficient public sector IT procurement, establishing a dynamic marketplace for cloud-based IT services. We have simplified the procurement process through G-Cloud to make it more accessible to a wider range of companies, leading to more choice, better value for the taxpayer and growth for the economy. Suppliers are asked what they can offer government, rather than being issued with complicated specifications that stifle innovation. This is the way we want government IT to be – simpler, quicker, cheaper and focused on matching solutions to business requirements, reducing waste and cutting costs.” Having survived its first year, sales then appeared to increase with nearly 1,000 invoiced purchases, sales of over £18.2 million to the end of March 2013 and McDonagh writing in May that the Home Office alone was putting through more than £6 million of orders due to the success of the CloudStore. With the Public Expenditure Cabinet Committee having agreed to put in place a Public Cloud First mandate for central government, whereby departments had a target to achieve 50 per cent of new IT spend on cloud and 25 per cent use of SMEs by value by 2015, E Volume 25.5 | GOVERNMENT BUSINESS MAGAZINE

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 G Cloud iii went live on 4 May alongside the launch of a new CloudStore. With the commencement of the third procurement iteration, the CloudStore now offered more than 800 suppliers and more than 7,000 services across all types of cloud service models, including public, private and hybrid. No longer stand alone Now that Giii was live, Denise McDonagh, the government’s G-Cloud director, signalled that it was right for G-Cloud to continue moving to ‘business as usual’, especially now that there had been three procurement frameworks successfully launched, as well as the CloudStore improvements, acceptance of the Public Cloud First mandate across central government and sales rising close to £22 million to the end of April 2013. Therefore, responsibility and instruction for G Cloud moved across to the Government Digital Service (GDS) at the beginning of June 2013. The previous month had seen the publication of the Major Projects Authority’s (MPA) annual report, revealing the performance of the government’s most expensive and important projects for the first time. Amongst other things, the report highlighted some concerns about how the G-Cloud programme was resourced, leading to GDS to increase the budget for the programme and to nearly double the size of the team working on the next iteration of the service - G-Cloud 4. At the start of August 2013, the Cabinet Office and GDS announced that G-Cloud 4 had been launched and welcomed the

In 2015, both the CloudStore and the Digital Services Store were to be replaced by the Digital Marketplace, providing one place for the public sector to buy digital and IT services and be the new home for G-Cloud services

next procurement round for applications to join G-Cloud. In a blog post to mark the launch, the Digital Marketplace team said that improvements in the new agreement included clearer instructions on how to apply

G-Cloud

sponsored by

for suppliers new to G-Cloud, as well as clearer instructions on how to carry forward services for suppliers already on Gii or Giii. The department also highlighted the benefits of the Government Procurement Service (GPS) E

Third Party Data Breaches The number of security incidents involving third party suppliers is increasing as their use becomes more and more prevalent. In response to this concern, the new Minimum Cyber Security Standard requires that:

“

Government Departments, organisations, agencies, Arm’s Length Bodies and contractors shall understand and manage security issues that arise because of dependencies on external suppliers or through their supply chain. The standard goes on to state that compliance: could be achieved by having suppliers assure their cyber security against the HMG Cyber Security Standard, or by requiring them to hold a valid Cyber Essentials certificate as a minimum.

”

Information Age Guided Cyber Essentials Certification Information Age Ltd. is an IASME certification body that offers guided Cyber Essentials Certification through supply chains, we map the supply chain, identify where certification is needed and then we guide suppliers to meet the required standard and certify it when achieved. The service is available via G-Cloud 10 (Service ID 592020908417246) to the principals or directly to suppliers. We provide a help desk, templates for policies and procedures, remediation support and progress checks to ensure compliance before moving on to the formal certification process. All for an fixed fee affordable for your third party organisations; so enabling you to achieve the minimum security standard. We can also provide Cyber Essential Plus and IASME Certification, if required.

For more information contact us at support@informationage.uk, see www.informationage.uk or call us on 0121 474 4001

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As of March 2016, the total sales made through G-Cloud since its inception four years previously surpassed the £1 billion mark. This total was helped by a significant number of sales, totalling £47 million, for the first month of 2016  eSourcing suite for responses to mandatory questions to meet procurement regulations and the GDS Service Submission Portal to make it easier for suppliers by ensuring documentation is a mandatory upload so there is no possibility of suppliers failing compliance for non-submission of documents. This made the process of uploading documents to the CloudStore simple. The opening of G-Cloud 4 also marked a further increase in sales. By September 2013, there were over 800 suppliers, 83 per cent of this being SMEs, as well as more than 7,000 services, and an impressive £44.7 million in sales. Approximately 63 per cent of these contracts were agreed with SMEs.

of £10 million was recorded in November, with just shy of £63.5 million held in sales. In total, 70 per cent of the number of sales

G-Cloud

sponsored by

were through central government; with 30 per cent through the rest of the public sector. Total sales recorded towards the end of December 2013 reached £78 million. The end of 2013 also revealed the share of public sector IT business SME suppliers win, with 56 per cent of total public sector spend by value through the G-Cloud framework going to SME suppliers. The SME percentage share of central government IT spend including through G-Cloud was even higher at 68 per cent. This is in stark contrast to the 10.5 per cent of central government spend in 2012/2013. As well as sales, a Digital marketplace blog of the same time predicted that savings of between E

More milestones paving the way for 5 October 2013 also saw the CloudStore reach another milestone, with sales figures having exceeded the £50 million mark, reaching £53.5 million by the end of the month. The percentage of spend on SMEs rose again, up from a reported 55 per cent to 58 per cent in the space of six weeks. A further rise

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Momentum Partners: Partnering with you for Success Momentum Partners (M3) specialises in partnering with public and private sector organisations going through major change. From the implementation of new management and governance to the controlled migration towards new Cloud services and agile development, the company will partner with you to ensure you achieve your goals efficiently and effectively. Wherever you or your organisation are currently in your change journey, M3 can work closely with you and help accelerate your progress. M3’s partners and consultants are senior change practitioners with extensive experience of helping organisations work through all of the complexity and challenge of adopting new operating models, drawing on many years of achieving results through practical design and delivery. The organisation’s consultants, all known professionally within their respective fields, can demonstrate a strong track record of success and are never afraid to get their hands dirty and work with your team at every level to put theory into practice and achieve your desired outcomes. M3 offers a distinctive value proposition – helping clients navigate through significant changes by providing advisory,

planning, design and delivery support services in a highly cost-effective manner when compared to traditional consulting and services firms. In short you can expect to receive top-end consultancy support, outcomes and results at highly competitive rates when compared to the traditional industry ‘big players’. M3 can engage with you via G Cloud and offer a compelling range of Cloud based services through that framework. These offerings are designed to help its clients successfully transition to new operating models, enabled by Cloud services, taking advantage of all the Cloud can offer. These include: the smart use of public Cloud for business function optimisation; using Cloud to implement new business services; reducing cost by only paying per

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use/user; reducing cost of run and maintain services; rapid introduction of new Cloudenabled business services; minimising new initiative costs; and reducing change costs. M3’s solutions are tailored to each client’s needs and are delivered in partnership, the keystone of its approach. The company’s overriding purpose is to build trust and work with its clients to solve important problems. It is this focus which informs the services it provides and the decisions it makes. An initial discussion will help shape how M3 can best help support your change journey. FURTHER INFORMATION Tel: 07989 420733 info@momentum3.co.uk

2014 claimed that nearly 90 per cent of local authorities had still not heard of G-Cloud. The GDS therefore set about sharing success stories from users and increasing awareness of G-Cloud across the wider public sector. G5 started accepting submissions in February and went live in May 2014 with 1,132 suppliers. The lots remained the same as previous framework iterations: Lot 1: Infrastructure As A Service (IaaS); Lot 2: Platform As A Service (PaaS); Lot 3: Software As A Service (SaaS); and Lot 4: Specialist Cloud Services (SCS). G5 brought the total number of suppliers on CloudStore to 1,518 and over 17,000 services, 9,236 of them new and 88 per cent of which were SMEs. By July, G-Cloud sales figures broke the £200 million barrier with a total spend of £217,455,674.39. CloudStore revealed that £116 million of this was with SMEs. The same month it was announced that the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead would be the first UK local authority to move to an entirely cloud-based infrastructure, with the authority spending just £100,000 setting it up. The solutions used to establish this included services bought through the G-Cloud framework. E  25 per cent and 75 per cent are not uncommon when using SMEs. Entering the new year, Francis Maude gave a speech at the Sprint 14 event setting out plans for a further £100 million to be spent with SMEs offering digital services by the next General Election, which happened to be in may the following year. Despite the obvious successes, and plans for G-Cloud 5 (G5) beginning to take shape, research carried out by the 6 Degree Group in early

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 The next challenge Both the CloudStore and the Digital Services Store were to be replaced by the Digital Marketplace, providing one place for the public sector to buy digital and IT services and be the new home for G-Cloud services. The idea of the Digital Marketplace was initially conceived to simply replace, feature-for-feature, the existing CloudStore, but as G-Cloud developed the brief and requirements also progressed. With total sales reaching over a quarter of a billion pounds, the next iterations of the G-Cloud and Digital Services frameworks were given a launch date of the end of October, with the aim of getting the new frameworks in place as early in 2015 as possible (February 2015). The lots for G-Cloud 6 (G6) remained exactly the same as they were for all previous iterations, looking at Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service, Software as a Service and Specialist Cloud Services to support transition to SaaS, PaaS and IaaS. At this point G-Cloud had been a resounding success, delivering a ground-breaking

commissioning framework that provides businesses of all sizes the same opportunity to offer commodity cloud services to government. It helped create a transparent and competitive market that opened up barriers to entry for small and medium-size businesses. In August, sales continued to grow at a fantastic rate and hit £314 million. £168 million (53 per cent) of sales were with SMEs. The previous July, when G-Cloud moved into GDS, monthly sales were averaging £8 million. By August 2014, monthly sales have increased to £27

million – nearly two and half times more. The Crown Commercial Service also introduced a new tool (BravoSolution) as part of G6 to improve the G-Cloud procurement. This iteration saw 1,453 suppliers, up by over 15 per cent on G5 applications and 10,827 new services added to the Digital Marketplace. It also saw 516 new suppliers added to the framework, bringing the total number of suppliers on the Digital Marketplace to 1,852 (87 per cent SMEs), with 19,966 services available. By the end of the year, sales reached over £345 million, averaging £27 million a month. Nearly three yers on from the introduction of G-Cloud, the department prided itself on the knowledge that 53 per cent of total sales by value and 61 per cent by volume had been awarded to SMEs. Crown Commercial Service then opened submissions for G-Cloud 7 (G7) at the end of August 2015. The G6 framework was due to end at the beginning of February 2016, but was extended several times to ensure that existing suppliers had time to apply to be on the G-Cloud 8 (G8) framework. E

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G7 attracted a higher number of new suppliers than any previous iteration of the G-Cloud framework. Crown Commercial Service now boasted of 709 new suppliers on the G7 framework, 95 per cent of which were SMEs

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 New suppliers keep arriving G7 services went live on the Digital Marketplace on 23 November 2015, meaning the public sector now had access to more services and suppliers of different sizes across the UK. G7 attracted a higher number of new suppliers than any previous iteration of the G-Cloud framework. Crown Commercial Service now boasted of 709 new suppliers on the G7 framework, 95 per cent of which were SMEs. There were 516 for G6, 89 per cent of those being SMEs. The total number of suppliers on the G-Cloud framework (G6 and G7) now stood at 2,566 and the public sector now had access to 22,080 services.

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Infrastructure as a Service covers the provision of processing, storage, networks and other fundamental computing resources that allow the consumer to deploy software, such as operating systems and applications The Digital Market Place also began working more closely with Crown Commercial Service and the Government Legal Department (GLD)

to find an efficient, legally compliant way for G Cloud suppliers to update their services. As of March 2016, the total sales made through G-Cloud since its inception four years previously surpassed the £1 billion mark. This total was helped by a significant number of sales, totalling £47 million, for the first month of 2016. This continued use of G-Cloud suggests that the public sector was becoming increasingly involved with cloud based services, products and consultancy, quashing previous views regrading adoption, and also proving that government organisations had become accustomed to choosing the framework to procure these. The average deal made in January 2016 was £14,329, with the largest deal made between Deloitte and the Royal Devon and Exeter NHS Foundation Trust for £1 million of undisclosed cloud services. This was followed by a £530,000 deal between the Ministry of Justice and Liberata, as well as a £400,000 contract between Maindec and the Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen University Hospitals NHS Trust. E Volume 25.5 | GOVERNMENT BUSINESS MAGAZINE

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 Pay-as-you-go cloud solutions The G-Cloud framework agreement continued to offer off-the-shelf, pay-as-you-go cloud solutions which span the same four ‘Lots’: infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, software as a service, and specialist cloud services. Infrastructure as a Service covers the provision of processing, storage, networks and other fundamental computing resources that allow the consumer to deploy software, such as operating systems and applications. This is effectively providing organisations with the capability to control their own operating systems, storage and deployed applications, without managing the underlying cloud infrastructure. Platform as a Service operates slightly differently, in that it provides the consumer with the capability to deploy onto the cloud infrastructure consumer-created or acquired applications created using programming languages, libraries, services, and tools supported by the provider. The consumer has control over the deployed application and possibly configuration settings for the application hosting environment, but does

not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure, which includes network, servers, operating systems and storage. Software as Service provides consumers with the capability to use the provider’s applications running on a cloud infrastructure. These applications are generally accessible from various devices through a client interface, such as a web browser (think web-based email), or a program interface. Consumers may have limited ability to manage user-specific application configuration settings, but the underlying cloud infrastructure, including network, servers, operating systems, storage and most individual application capabilities, are controlled by the provider. Lot 4, Specialist Cloud Services, continues to support the design and implementations of cloud based services and is split into a number of sub-categories: business analysis, legacy to cloud rationalisation, design/consultation, transition management and service management. Business analysis is the provision to offer skills to identify and analyse organisational

The development of the G-Cloud was the government’s response to the potential efficiencies of the cloud and the need for the public sector to achieve more while spending less money

needs and how transferring some or all existing IT systems to cloud based systems could increase efficiencies and savings. Legacy to cloud rationalisation is where suppliers offer the skills to identify which parts of a legacy system or infrastructure could be migrated onto a cloud based system. This kind of service is usually reserved for organisations that have identified potential efficiencies in moving to the cloud, but require some additional support in how to design and implement this transition. The provision to offer cloud based system designs inclusive of iterative design, development and ongoing maintenance of existing cloud services falls under the design/consultation sub-category of Lot 4. These designs can include the specification of what a solutions could/should look like, and consumers can then purchase that solution ‘off the shelf’ via other Lots or designed by teams and development sourced from other frameworks. Once a customer had a system design in place, they could then call on suppliers to handle the transition management, in which they manage the actual transfer of services onto the cloud based system, including the the on boarding and off boarding of data, the migration of existing services between data centres and end user training. Customers could also use the G7 to find a supplier that offers continuous service management of their cloud solutions. This would likely include service integration, management of multiple cloud solutions and the integration of cloud and noncloud services. Additionally, cyber security consultancy is also available on the framework, but this service varies considerably between suppliers based on their area of expertise, meaning that consumers should carefully consider if a supplier matches their specific needs. Services excluded from the G7 framework include co-location services, non-cloud related services, products or consultancy, bespoke digital project build services and hardware.

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Increased procurement confidence August 2016 saw the 8th version of G-Cloud (G8) go live on the government’s Digital Marketplace. Targeted at easing the procurement of cloud computing based information technology services by public-sector bodies, the G-Cloud consists of a series of framework agreements with suppliers, from which public sector organisations can buy services without needing to run a full tender or competition procurement process. It aims to offer simplicity and ease the procurement burden. Suppliers sign up to frameworks on the Digital Marketplace, a government online procurement store in kind, from which anyone in the public sector can select their services accordingly. The development of the G-Cloud was the government’s response to the potential efficiencies of the cloud and the need for the public sector to achieve more while spending less money. According to government statistics of the time, G8 attracted the largest number of suppliers since the creation E Volume 25.5 | GOVERNMENT BUSINESS MAGAZINE

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 of the G-Cloud, with 94 per cent of the 757 new suppliers being a SME. Over half of the £1.3 billion spent through the G-Cloud went to SMEs as of June 2016. On Cloud 9 The G-Cloud 9 framework agreement, launched in May 2017, was the latest iteration of the framework which allows UK public sector bodies access to cloud computing services via a compliant procurement vehicle. New iterations of the framework were considered at a varying frequency of six-12 months, depending on the demand for and/or availability of new services as the IT cloud market develops. Launched with 2,847 suppliers, G9 underwent several changes with the aim of providing a more flexible maximum contract length. Earlier versions of G-Cloud were designed to run parallel with its predeceasing agreement by design. However, G 9 was run as a single framework, requiring all aspiring and existing suppliers to have registered to offer services. This means that buyers and suppliers would be able to use one set of contracts for all their G-Cloud services. G7 and G8 were removed from the Digital Marketplace when G9 service went live. Meanwhile, Tony Singleton, best known for creating and developing G-Cloud, announced the day before G9 launched that he was to leave the civil service after 35 years. In a blog post on the Government Digital Service he said he would be looking for ‘new challenges’ that would involve ‘helping the public sector turn ideas into reality’. Singleton

said his period in government had seen ‘incredible change’ that continues to gather pace, but that more dynamism is needed. Mike Bracken, the former head of the GDS, called Singelton ‘the man who, more than anyone, defined the digital transformation for public servants’ in a Twitter message. Node4 was one of the companies awarded a place on G9, with the N4 Private Cloud, Cyber Security Services, NetApp Private Storage as a Service (NPSaaS), Storage as a Service (STaaS), Backup as a Service (BUaaS), Disaster Recovery

suppliers meet the CCS approval criteria and readily engage with them. Being a G-Cloud 9 supplier means that public sector services have better access to Node4’s solutions to run mission-critical systems and services.” UKCloud was another vendor that celebrated its approval to the agreement. The company committed to delivering more for less on G9, offering further cost reductions across its service catalogue, including its Cross Domain Security Zone (CDSZ), which predicted price falls of up to 50 per cent.

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Councils are clearly ‘cloud aware’, and while there may not be a formal strategy for the whole organisation, they are making decisions on a case-by-case basis and being opportunistic about where cloud IT can play a role as a Service (DRaaS), Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) powered by Cisco and Amazon Web Services (AWS) solutions listed on the framework, making these available to UK public sector organisations. Paula Johnston, head of Public Sector at Node4, said: “A number of public sector organisations are increasing their use of cloud services due to its flexibility and cost savings. G-Cloud 9 makes it easier for organisations to check which types of

Simon Hansford, CEO, noted: “As a committed supporter of G-Cloud, we welcome the latest iteration which promises to be the best yet, thanks to the comprehensive consultation process undertaken by the Government Digital Service and CCSe. As a supplier to the framework since the very beginning, we are delighted to continue our tradition of releasing several new and enhanced service offerings on the innovative new G-Cloud 9.” E

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Ever had the feeling you’re not seeing all the talent in your organisation? Maybe you’re missing the best bits?

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Cracking the Talent Puzzle: capitalising on your in-house talent and capabilities G-Cloud certification has unlocked a world of digital tools for the public sector. These tools have driven efficiencies, shortened project cycles and helped government to reach out more effectively to communities. But in the excitement of these disruptive technologies, it’s easy to forget that the most flexible, and capable resource in the public sector is its talent. In the words of the late management guru, Peter Drucker, ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’: putting effort into people beats planning every time. So why don’t we optimise the effectiveness of our labour force in the same way we optimise processes? The reason is probably an old-fashioned belief that jobs – and the people in them – are unchanging. Sure, the civil service is immune to many of the unpredictabilities of the labour market. But that doesn’t mean employees live in a vacuum. Their ambitions and interests change, and so do the skills which are valued in any role. We typically find that 30 per cent of any team has at least some level of misplaced confidence in their own abilities. Equally, an often hidden 20 per cent are both highly capable and under-utilised. All these people have latent talents

which can be nurtured, refined and directed, for improved efficiency plus a happier and more motivated workforce. But the toolkit so far has been disjointed. Psychometrics are informative but not applied to a team’s real-world experiences. L&D is appreciated by employees, but can tail off in value. And employee engagement reinforces a positive culture but often becomes mere bribery: perks without obligations! Cognisco’s unique approach starts with judgement: not what employees recall or feel on a given day, but a scientific assessment of how they are likely to practically apply their knowledge in realistic situations. By understanding teams and individual employees, we can identify and quantify

those latent skills and unlock dramatic improvements in both productivity and motivation. We help discover the right people to fill roles with confidence. We reduce the risk and cost of mis-hires. And we discover the hidden talents that mean individuals can pursue fulfilling and challenging careers; so that you can motivate and retain the people who will be delivering the public services of the future. To uncover and capitalise on the latent talent and capability you already have in-house, speak to Cognisco. FURTHER INFORMATION Tel: 01235 757520 www.cognisco.com

 The latest cloud The 3,505 suppliers on the G-Cloud 10 framework, which gives central government, local councils, NHS trusts and other public sector bodies a way to purchase cloud-based services such as web hosting from a single, central website, is 649 more than featured on the previous iteration of G-Cloud 9. G-Cloud 10, which could eventually be worth £600 million, is the latest cloud-based framework agreement which has seen more than £3 billion of cloud and digital services procured by public bodies since 2012, with 48 per cent of that spend going directly to SMEs. Alongside the Digital Outcomes and Specialists framework, the G-Cloud framework is transforming government procurement. These two frameworks mean government can buy the right technology and services from the right suppliers at the right price. By making procurement clear and simple, they are opening up the marketplace to suppliers of all sizes and from all parts of the country. They are creating a level playing field that means that all private sector enterprises can be involved in helping government work better for everyone. It is for use by the UK public sector to buy cloud computing services covering hosting, software and cloud support on a commodity based, pay-as-you go service. A commercial agreement of 12 months’ duration, CCS has said that the duration may be extended for any period up to a maximum of twelve months from the expiry of the initial term, which is set at 1 July 2019.

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Benefits of the G-Cloud agreement include access to nearly 25,000 services and 3,500 suppliers, as well as scalable services which can be expanded or shrunk as demand requires Discussing the new framework agreement, which went live at the start of July, Oliver Dowden, Minister for Implementation, said: “Small businesses are the backbone of our economy, delivering innovative solutions in partnership with the public sector, fuelling economic growth and supporting the delivery of efficient, effective public services that meet the needs of citizens. The success of G-Cloud demonstrates how we are breaking down the barriers for SMEs who want to supply to government.” Simpler for suppliers Writing on the Government Digital Service blog, Ben Welby and Patrick Opoosun explained back in April how GDS has made things simpler for suppliers on G-Cloud 10, and, now that it is open for business, the content is worth revisiting. G-Cloud 10 is run as a collaboration between the Government Digital Service and the Crown Commercial Service and is operated through the Digital Marketplace.

G-Cloud 10 is in response to supplier needs to refresh services and open the market up to new suppliers, but, because CCS and GDS were able to meet these needs without overhauling or radically changing G-Cloud 9, it took a minimum viable product (MVP) approach, meaning it could launch quickly and give the market what it needed. G-Cloud 10 is an iteration of G-Cloud 9, which means existing suppliers should be familiar with it. But a few important improvements and extensions have been made. As well as cloud services, suppliers can now apply to sell cyber security services on G-Cloud 10. This includes services that are assured under these National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) schemes: Cyber Security Consultancy; Penetration Testing (CHECK); and Cyber Incident Response (CIR). GDS has also created a new supplier section on the Digital Marketplace, which lets suppliers store essential information such as company contact details and registration information centrally. The supplier section E Volume 25.5 | GOVERNMENT BUSINESS MAGAZINE

Nokia joins G-Cloud Nokia is offering high performance missioncritical networks, Cloud and IoT connectivity solutions on UK Governmentâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Digital Marketplace â&#x20AC;&#x201C; G-Cloud 10. Visit us on www.digitalmarketplace. service.gov.uk/g-cloud/ search?q=nokia

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 runs across both the G-Cloud and Digital Outcomes and Specialists frameworks and means suppliers no longer have to fill out information for each individual application. They can just enter the information once and use it again and again, saving time on applications. While new suppliers applied to G-Cloud 10 by creating a supplier account, existing suppliers on G-Cloud 9 also needed to apply, but to make things simpler for them, GDS redesigned the process to allow them to simply copy over their G-Cloud 9 declaration and services into G-Cloud 10. Three Lots There are three Lots to the G-Cloud 10 agreement, looking at Cloud Hosting (Lot 1), Cloud Software (Lot 2) and Cloud Support (Lot 3). To be included in Lot 1, are cloud platform or infrastructure services that can help buyers do at least one of deploying, managing and running software and provision and use processing, storage or networking resources. Lot 2 companies must be applications that are typically accessed over a public or private network e.g. the internet and hosted in the cloud, while those included in Lot 3 must help buyers set up and maintain their cloud software or hosting services. Cloud adoption in 2018 Back in March, not-for-profit provider technology company Eduserv and Socitm published a report, Local government cloud adoption in 2018, which surveyed 373 local councils across England, as well as interviews with a range of technology leaders on local government. It found that, five years on from the Cabinet Office’s ‘cloud first’ policy, the majority of councils have yet to formalise the way they will use cloud in their organisation. With previous research from 2016 finding that 39 per cent of councils had a cloud IT policy, the 2018 iteration of the research reports that 38 per cent of councils have a policy governing the deployment of Software as a Service (SaaS) and cloud infrastructure, 43 per cent have guidance or a strategy for the use of Saas and 44 per cent have guidance or a strategy for cloud infrastructure. Public cloud is now the most commonly used form of cloud computing among councils.

The two authoring organisations claim that councils are clearly ‘cloud aware’, and while there may not be a formal strategy for the whole organisation, they are making decisions on a case-by-case basis and

being opportunistic about where cloud IT can play a role. With policy taking a long time to filter down through organisations, the somewhat strange decision of not having an organisation-wide cloud strategy becomes slightly more understandable. It appears that council IT teams are content to adopt cloud as and when, especially if they can support operations areas which will see immediate benefits. Roy Grant, head of ICT at York City Council, said: “In the past, councils have focused on delivering big IT infrastructure projects, often across the council and normally in partnership with the big IT suppliers. In doing this, we have ended up with the equivalent of a slow-moving oil tanker where changing direction takes time and is far more complicated than it needs to be. The way we are approaching our IT is to focus on our users and bring in agile ways of working which can deliver change at a faster pace. That means working at different speeds with different parts of the business. It also means identifying and deploying applications E

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 and infrastructure which allows us to meet the priorities of the business as they emerge. Moving away from ‘big IT’ has allowed us to quickly deliver projects which in the past have taken a long time to go nowhere.” Other figures from the report highlight that 62 per cent of councils store data in the cloud, up from 52 per cent in 2016. Furthermore, 81 per cent use one or more on-premise datacentre(s), 42 per cent use a third-party data centre and 64 per cent of councils use both on-premise and cloud hosting. Society pinpoint the decision of councils to run cloud alongside on-premise systems rather than displace existing IT infrastructure. The result is that a ‘hybrid model for IT’ is now domanant in local government, with nearly two thirds of councils deploying IT in this way. However, for many organisations, greater cloud use is being delayed by the need to first bring stability and then rationalise existing IT infrastructure. There is no escaping that the demands of legacy IT will continue to consume resources which might otherwise be directed at delivering a more rapid move to cloud. Making things simpler for suppliers on G-Cloud 10 So far, nearly £3 billion has been spent through the G-Cloud framework, with 48 per cent of that spend going to SMEs. G-Cloud 10 is an iteration of G-Cloud 9, which means existing suppliers should be familiar with it. But there have also been a few important improvements and extensions made. As well as cloud services, suppliers

The 3,505 suppliers on G10, which gives government, local councils and other public sector bodies a way to purchase cloud-based services from a single, central website, is 649 more than featured on the previous iteration of G9 can now apply to sell cyber security services on G-Cloud 10. This includes services that are assured under these National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) schemes: Cyber Security Consultancy; Penetration Testing (CHECK); and Cyber Incident Response (CIR). To make things easier for suppliers, GDS has created a new supplier section on the Digital Marketplace, letting suppliers store essential information such as company contact details and registration information centrally. The supplier section runs across both the G-Cloud and Digital Outcomes and Specialists frameworks and means suppliers no longer have to fill out information for each individual application. They can just enter the information once and use it again and again, saving time on applications. Having taken an MVP approach and simplified the application process for existing suppliers, GDS has already seen far more applications at an early stage to G-Cloud 10 than to G9. When the previous iteration had been open for one day, it had

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15 completed services and 14 completed applications. After one day of G-Cloud 10, it recorded 95 completed services and 39 completed applications. This is more than six times as many services and nearly three times as many applications. Alongside the Digital Outcomes and Specialists framework, the G-Cloud framework is transforming government procurement. These two frameworks mean government can buy the right technology and services from the right suppliers at the right price. And by making procurement clear and simple, they are opening up the marketplace to suppliers of all sizes and from all parts of the country. They are creating a level playing field that means that all private sector enterprises can be involved in helping government work better for everyone. L FURTHER INFORMATION https://ccs-agreements.cabinetoffice. gov.uk/contracts/rm155710

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Changing the relationship between the public sector and the cloud The cloud and shared services have long ease of access to these services, but been heralded as the answer by successive there have been rumours in the past of governments to drastically bring down shared services projects not attracting the cost of purchasing and maintaining IT the support of key central government systems. The logic being that it would give departments and local authorities still central and local authorities more scale to unclear about their cloud strategies. negotiate tougher deals with A study by Solar Winds earlier the big vendors. However, this year suggested there the adoption of the was still a good degree of C ertainly cloud is a mixed bag hesitation about the best , G-Clou across the UK public way forward. 41 per cent d has acted a sector. Certainly of central government sa G-Cloud has acted and 79 per cent of NHS focal p central o as a central focal respondents said they i n t public s f point for public were not planning ervice b or odies service bodies to migrate all their conside r i considering cloud systems to the cloud. n g cloud b based applications. This is understandable a applic sed It provides greater given the complexity of

ations

legacy infrastructures in the public sector and the incredible constraints on government spending. For example, 50 per cent of respondents admitted legacy technology was one of the main obstacles to the adoption of the cloud. More significant still were the statistics that 50 per cent said they were worried about vendor lock-in and 47 per cent were concerned about the lack of control over performance in the cloud. Replacing handcuffs While the burden of legacy systems and other complaints such as the lack of cloud computing skills are understandable it is more concerning that public sector organisations are being put off the cloud, because they fear vendor lock-in. Clearly, there is a wellworn narrative that moving to the cloud is E

Volume 25.5 | GOVERNMENT BUSINESS MAGAZINE

Written by Catherine Kiaie, UK Public Sector Account Director, EnterpriseDB

Catherine Kiaie looks at the adoption of the cloud in the public sector and addresses some of the key concerns that have been raised in the past about vendor lock-in and losing control of sensitive data

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 almost like replacing one set of handcuffs for another, as organisations shift from long-standing, costly on-premise licensing contracts to relationships with the same vendors in the cloud. That there are really only six main Infrastructure-as-a-Service vendors – of whom two really dominate market share (Amazon, Microsoft Azure) – is not healthy. In the private sector there is a clear move to adopt a multi-cloud strategy to prevent over-reliance on one vendor and this should present similar opportunities in the public sector. Organisations should be able to choose different vendors to provide specific applications via Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), or adopt Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions, which suit their organisational needs. This approach ensures public sector bodies maintain some level of choice about who and how their IT systems are delivered at any chosen point in time. Shifting critical information The question of control is an even more troubling one, because there is some discussion that vendors are not interested in shifting their customers applications or databases into the cloud, but shifting their

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41 per cent of central government and 79 per cent of NHS respondents are not planning to migrate all their systems to the cloud. This is understandable given the complexity of legacy infrastructures and the incredible constraints on government spending data into the cloud. The worry is that once it is there it will become far too difficult for companies to shift their critical information to an alternative provider simply because of the complexity of migrating data between two cloud platforms that are differently set up. Certainly, some customers may be quite happy leaving their systems with one vendor, but increasingly we are finding that customers want to be able to spin up instances in the cloud as their businesses’ demand and shift data between on premise and cloud-based applications.

Having the right tools to enable deployment in the cloud is crucial to addressing this issue of control. It gives businesses the flexibility and agility customers need to respond to the demands of their organisations without being tied to one vendor. This is where open source can be a very powerful tool in handing back control to customers. Take the open source project, PostgreSQL, which stems from the same structured query language origins as the Oracle Database. This shared relational heritage simplifies the migration from Oracle to PostgreSQL, because many of the core E Volume 25.5 | GOVERNMENT BUSINESS MAGAZINE

î &#x2020; procedures are similar and for DBAs it requires very little training to get up and running. Added to this the cost efficiencies and constant oversight of an active open source community makes for a platform ideally suited to the public sector and absolutely puts organisations in control of their cloud environments. While avoiding lock-in and ensuring control over your data are two key issues the third has to be the ease of adoption and management of your databases in the cloud. Thankfully, database automation solutions are now maturing to enable organisations to remove much of the complexity of spinning up instances, shifting data and moving between on premise and cloud environments. Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) has been heralded by Gartner has the fastest growing segment in the Platform-as-a-Service sector, because the ability to automate the design, deployment, management and optimisation of your databases is giving database users the agility they need without the traditional complexity and cost of database deployments. The good news for public sector organisations that are reticent to move sensitive data to the public cloud is that DBaaS can be used to deploy databases on premise, to hybrid cloud and public cloud environments. Addressing the obstacles Therefore, I would say I am confident that in the coming year we will see continued momentum in the adoption of cloud-based database platforms in the public sector,

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We will see continued momentum in the adoption of cloud-based database platforms in the public sector, because mature tools and technologies now exist to enable cost effective adoption because mature tools and technologies now exist to enable cost effective adoption. Public sector bodies are right to be cautious of the potential for vendor lock-in and must demand complete control over their data, but they should not be held back concerns over the complexity of unpicking legacy systems. Open source software and database automation solutions can easily address the challenges

public sector bodies face, so that they can manage down their IT costs while ensuring they build IT infrastructures agile enough to cope with the demands of the digital era. L FURTHER INFORMATION https://ccs-agreements.cabinetoffice. gov.uk/contracts/rm155710

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G-Cloud – the impact of moving from 9 to 10

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Andrew Mellish, public sector business manager of Six Degrees, discusses the initial benefits of decision of the Crown Commercial Services to push G-Cloud 10 live in June, and how it has provided opportunities for new cloud suppliers to pitch for government work for two years and blocking technological advances the government is effectively working against SME suppliers and ultimately hindering change and progress. The good news is that the CCS has now subsequently reversed its decision, announcing earlier in March that a new iteration of G-Cloud will be delivered in June. Oliver Dowden, minister for implementation acknowledged that ‘small businesses are the backbone of our economy, so it’s crucial we listen to them when shaping policy’.

According to UK government figures, sales through the G-Cloud framework reached over £2.8 billion at the end of 2017. SME vendors played a big role in this figure, accounting for 47 per cent of total sales by value and 73 per cent by volume. Overall, 83 per cent of total business was from central government and 17 per cent from the wider public sector. These figures support the fact that the G-Cloud framework has facilitated the increase in cloud adoption and broadened the pool of SME suppliers for public sector organisations. It is why we welcomed the Crown Commercial Services’ (CCS) decision to push G-Cloud 10 live in June, which provided the opportunity for new cloud suppliers to pitch for government work and existing ones on the framework to update their service offering. G-Cloud and its opportunities for SMEs Since it launched in 2012, the G-Cloud framework, with its sleek procurement processes, has created opportunities for SMEs to provide innovative, cloud-based IT solutions for the public sector. It reduces time, cost and risks for suppliers and customers, resulting in an attractive solution being procured within a much shorter timeframe. Essentially, the G-Cloud framework has been the gateway for many SMEs to work in the public sector, securing key business that in many instances has helped to shape them, their offerings and their market approach. But, while G-cloud has done much to open

Challenges may not change in the near future So, while public sector suppliers have welcomed the government turnaround, some argue that the high proportion of suppliers still not engaging with the framework suggests a radical overhaul to G-Cloud is required to make it work better for all, and a year’s delay is a price worth paying for getting it right. There is some merit in this argument, as opportunities, create transparency and many suppliers agree that with G-Cloud there’s level the playing field to a large degree, no visibility of tenders and opportunities it hasn’t always been smooth sailing. – knowing if you’re in the running for an opportunity is a key area for improvement. The importance Another issue already mentioned is the fact of the CCS’s about-turn that the framework is inflexible when it The framework agreement for the current comes to suppliers needing to adjust pricing, G-Cloud 9 was supposed to expire in May this particularly third-party price increases that year. But the government took are out of the control of suppliers. the decision in November Since Leaving the framework ‘as is’ 2017 to extend it by however would also likely another 12 months to it launc have a detrimental effect on give the CCS and the 2012, t hed in he G-C new suppliers to the public Government Digital loud framew sector market, to those Service (GDS) ork has created developing new services time to ‘deliver opportu and any that need to a revolutionary for SME nities make pricing changes. transformation s t o provide innovat Delaying changes by 12 to the platform ive months means the buyer to meet more IT solut , cloud-based (and, by extension, the user needs ions tax payer) is being denied – both central public s for the ector innovation and the positive government and effect of increased competition. wider public sector’. That is why the benefits of This was met with a moving G-Cloud from iteration 9 barrage of criticism from to 10 far outweighs the disadvantages of SMEs, who as suppliers are unable to alter simply extending the current framework. prices or update their service offerings, And we’re hopeful that the challenges will because of the constraint of having to wait be ironed out as iterations progress. L until the next iteration is available to make updates. This seems to work against the very essence of what G-Cloud is supposed FURTHER INFORMATION to represent and enable. If we consider https://ccs-agreements. that most of the innovation is being driven cabinetoffice.gov.uk/g-cloud-10 by SMEs, by locking down the framework

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Cloud success for Croydon Council Croydon Council has streamlined its software packages by moving to one cloud based system using G-Cloud from Crown Commercial Service

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The streets division within the Place department at Croydon Council deal with all highways contracts, woodlands and the management of assets. Previously, the authority was using four different information management systems to administer and service all aspects within the streets division. This generated inconsistency and put a strain on resource and finance required for the management, support and maintenance of the four different systems. Originally the council had taken the decision to run its own OJEU for a single solution to consolidate the four solutions into one. The OJEU had started to be planned in summer 2017 with the release of supplier questionnaires in November. However, this was unsuccessful with suppliers only being able to meet two of the requirements needed. After the failure of the OJEU to provide an appropriate supplier who could meet all of the demands required, the timescales were tight. The council needed to have the contract in place and implemented by November G-Clou 2018 in readiness for a d 9 a llowed large highways contract, the council which needed the t o p r o the so cure systems to be up to date.

lu a short tion within and ga timescale v a broade access to ran supplie ge of rs

Pitney Bowes UK Croydon Council looked in to the G-Cloud 9 framework from Crown Commercial Service on the Digital Marketplace. It decided that Lot 3 for Cloud Hosted Software could offer the ideal route to market. It allowed the council to procure the solution within a short timescale and gave access to a broad range

of suppliers who could meet all of its needs. After documenting a comprehensive set of requirements that were needed to achieve the savings and consolidated approach, Croydon Council was ready with it’s requirement documents in early 2018. Using the search and filter tool on the Digital Marketplace

allowed the council to quickly and efficiently narrow down the search based on its needs. It was able to approach the shortlisted suppliers with clarification questions, which enabled it to ensure the successful supplier could deliver the hosting, support, and software elements required. The contract was awarded to Pitney Bowes UK in April 2018, at a total cost of £470,000, including implementation, over a potential four year contract. Substantial savings were made for the software support alone, with the council saving £75,000 a year. Croydon Council place high importance on being able to ask for social value commitments that they can measure on every tender, which was something it was able to build in to their procurement via CCS’ G-Cloud framework. The council have successfully taken the four software packages off the data servers and moved to one cloud based system, which is hosted in the UK. This procurement aligns to local government’s Cloud First policy and helps with business continuity. Using the G-Cloud framework, Croydon Council was also able to meet the timescale to have a solution in place by November 2018. L FURTHER INFORMATION https://ccsheretohelp.uk/croydoncouncil-saves-250000/

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Making the most of G-Cloud Jake Madders, co-founder and director of Hyve Managed Hosting, outlines some crib sheet questions to ask every cloud provider The digital marketplace lists a wide range Technical capabilities of cloud providers, offering public sector In choosing a cloud supplier, there are some organisations choice, expertise and technical key areas to focus on to really understand capabilities. But how do you levels of technical expertise. separate the good from the What are the proven average? What makes the technical capabilities of the I n difference between an provider? Are there any choosin ideal partner with just gaps in their skillset? g a cloud s the right experience How much in-house u pplier, there a and a service provider expertise do they r e who canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t guarantee have? If partners areas to some key service or provision? are involved, what f o c u t o s on really u Choices like these can is the nature of the levels o nderstand make or break a cloud partnership and can f tec project, add huge value they demonstrate expertishnical or cause serious delay and how technical e frustration. There are a range excellence is shared of key areas that most cloud across their teams? Are all projects will touch on in one way the technical capabilities you or another, and ensuring the providers need already in place, or will they be in the mix are right for your needs is vital. adding extras to deliver your project? Here are six major areas to explore focusing on an effective way to understand Experience experience, pricing, skillset and service Focused experience is often a key factor levels, among others. Think of this as in successful project delivery. Providers a crib sheet of questions to help make might have great general or related the best cloud provider choices. experience, but the more specific the better.

Do they have strong experience in your sector and with your type of project? Can they supply you with customer references that illustrate their track record? Have they experienced any serious service delivery issues or failures in the past? Project/service delivery Service providers rely on teamwork to deliver specialised knowledge and technology, and their project management skills will always be put to the test. Can they give examples of where they have delivered projects/services on time and on budget? What is their project management process and is it compatible with your needs? Accreditations Sometimes they are a must have and often they provide that extra level of reassurance and confidence. Either way, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s important to understand their accreditations and qualifications. Do they have the right accreditations, certifications and governance standards in place to meet your needs? E Volume 25.5 | GOVERNMENT BUSINESS MAGAZINE

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 Service and support Great service and support is right up there with design, delivery and implementation, but can also be challenging to assess. Where do their support services begin and end? What don’t they offer as standard? How do they provide support outside of normal working hours? What is the support process, and do they provide dedicated staff? What support systems and processes do they have in place to deal with the unexpected and unlikely?

Competitive, fair and clear pricing is important for any organisation, but scrutiny of public sector spend is always a hot topic – and for very good reasons

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Pricing Competitive, fair and clear pricing is important for any organisation, but scrutiny of public sector spend is always a hot topic – and for very good reasons. How do they demonstrate pricing clarity and transparency? How do they monitor and manage third party costs? Are there any scenarios where additional costs may be incurred which fall outside of their normal boundaries? Understanding these important areas can help build your perspective on the capabilities of each cloud provider, and how they compare against each other. Clearly it’s just as important to dig into the precise needs of your project, but having a foundation to your discussions can help move the process along with clarity and precision. L FURTHER INFORMATION www.hyve.com

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Advertisement Feature

Could frameworks save your organisation money? Using frameworks can help you choose better, cheaper suppliers. So you can spend public money more effectively – and make savings, too xoxoxoxo SUBHEADERS L FURTHER INFORMATION xxx

Budgets are shrinking. It’s a reality that everyone in the public sector is used to by now. But there are ways to spend smarter and make your money go further without losing out on quality or efficiency. Frameworks are a mechanism for buying services with public money. They help public sector organisations like yours evaluate suppliers based on suitability, capabilities and value. Using frameworks could save your organisation up to 25 per cent compared to traditional contracted IT services. It sounds too good to be true. But they’ll give you more choice, from a wider range of suppliers. They’re easier to manage, because you can handle everything through one intermediary. And because frameworks are made up of companies that have been selected for their quality and value, you know you’re getting the best deal. Because if a supplier was overpriced, or the quality of their product or service was low, they wouldn’t be included in the framework in the first place. There are 30,000 public sector organisations in the UK, and collectively, they spend around £800 billion of taxpayers money each year. It’s a big responsibility. But choosing a costeffective framework doesn’t just mean extra money that your organisation can spend elsewhere. It also means better communication with your citizens, better care and better tools. That means your people can work together more effectively, and get more done.

The inside track If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance that you already know how useful frameworks can be. You might already be using frameworks in your organisation. But with hundreds to choose from, are you sure you’re getting the best deal, from the best suppliers? Choosing the right framework for your organisation is still important. The Crown Commercial Service (CCS) is the body running the national procurement service for the UK. It’s an executive agency of the Cabinet Office, which means it’s also an important part of the #SmarterGov campaign. It operates over 80 frameworks for the public sector, and brings together policy, advice, and direct buying. So it can provide commercial services to public sector organisations like yours – and save taxpayer money. And if you choose to work with CCS, you only need to work through a single body. In 2017/18, CCS helped public sector organisations procure £13 billion of common goods and services. It helped the University of Central Lancashire save over £25,000 a year on water bills. And it helped seven fire and rescue services save a whopping £807,000 – an average of 26 per cent – on IT hardware through an aggregated further competition. If you opt to work with CCS, you’ll be joining over 17,000 organisations in the public sector. And you’ll get to choose services provided by more than 5,000

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suppliers. It’s a big network, and it’s aiming to be the first choice for frameworks for the entire public sector. For more info, go to https://business.bt.com/solutions/ public-sector/framework-agreements/ Better frameworks in London If your organisation is based in the capital, you might want to consider the London ICT Framework to get a solution that suits your budget. It’s designed for public sector organisations that want a faster, more cost-effective procurement process and flexibility with OPEX and CAPEX options. The Framework was formed through a partnership between three London Boroughs, and now supplies everything from fixed and mobile connections to LAN infrastructure and cloud services to organisations across London. The London ICT Framework is open to all public sector organisations in London, including the NHS, Transport for London, the Metropolitan and City of London police forces, social landlords and even schools. It already works with several NHS trusts across the capital, London boroughs including Kensington & Chelsea and Bromley, and the London Ambulance Service, as well as City and Islington College. In total, 24 organisations are procuring services through the framework. The goal is to offer the best value and capability to London’s public sector. And because the London ICT Framework don’t cost anything to consume – unlike some frameworks that apply a surcharge – it’s closing in on achieving that goal. What’s more, because it’s backed up by BT, it’s backed by the best UK fixed and mobile networks. Plus, users get powerful security, 24/7 expertise, and partnerships with some of the world’s leading vendors. The London ICT Framework is just one example of how a framework could help your organisation, but there are plenty of others to choose from. Whether you’re looking at frameworks for the first time or already use them in your organisation and are considering expanding them further, the potential is clear. And they might just offer a simpler way to get your budget in the black. L FURTHER INFORMATION Want to know more, or take part in any upcoming London ICT Framework, please write to Andy Taylor andy.j.taylor@bt.com.

Frameworks

A cost-effective way to recruit temporary staff Sponsored by the Department for Education (DfE), the Supply Teachers framework gives schools access to a compliant avenue to recruit temporary staff With the Supply Teachers framework now Lot 1 is the preferred supplier list supported live, schools can recruit all temporary roles by an agency selection tool. You will need ranging from supply teachers and classroom to know the type of worker and length of assistants, to admin support and cleaners, assignment you require, then use the tool through to head teachers. The framework to search for suppliers by distance from will help organisations fill both urgent short your organisation. You can contact suppliers term positions and longer term assignments identified using the tool directly. When you and is available to all UK schools, colleges, have chosen a supplier, sign an order form academies, trusts, nurseries, pupil referral and send it to them. You only have to do units, children centres and further education this once per supplier and there is no limit institutions. As such, it is not available to the number of suppliers you can use. to independent (for-profit) schools. Lot 2 is for the master vendor managed The framework has been brought into service. A master vendor can provide all your place to ensure consistent high quality in temporary recruitment needs from a the provision of supply teachers by single supplier. If you choose employment agencies, at the a master vendor, they Y ou best possible value. Of the will supply whatever can thousands of recruitment candidates they can, also ch companies in England, and where they manag oose a 140 agencies have been can’t, they will find e d s awarded a place onto other suppliers e r v pro ice the framework following who can. source vider who wil all your l a stringent bids and Several tendering process. staffing temporary suppliers on the With transparency deal can provide the sam needs to on agency mark-ups a master vendor e audit ed, you will know exactly accredi t e what you are paying, and d standar have the peace of mind that ds agencies adhere to standard levels of practice, including no temp-to-perm fees after 12 working weeks (subject to four weeks notice being given). This means you can manage costs without sacrificing quality and standards, safe in the knowledge that agencies are audited and accredited and comply with the best safeguarding standards in education recruitment, including DfE’s Keeping Children Safe in Education guidance. If you are a multi-academy trust, local authority or part of a group of schools that collaborate and have a high volume of requirements, you can also choose a managed service provider who will source all your temporary staffing needs to the same audited, accredited standards.

managed service. Please contact all of the suppliers listed with your requirements to run a further competition to select the one that’s right for you. Take a look at the Crown Commercial Service guidance on how to run a further competition. Once the further competition is completed and you have selected a supplier, sign an order form and send it to them. You should also send all your requirements for workers to the winning supplier and notify the unsuccessful suppliers. Lot 3 caters the neutral vendor managed service. A neutral vendor can also provide all your temporary recruitment needs. A neutral vendor will contract with other suppliers to fulfil your requirements but don’t provide candidates of their own. There is one neutral vendor managed service provider on the deal. Contact them to sign an order form and to send all your requirements. L FURTHER INFORMATION https://ccs-agreements.cabinetoffice. gov.uk/contracts/rm3826

Accessing the deal You should have received an email from DfE at the end of August giving you access to an Agency Selection Tool. This tool will help you find suitable suppliers in your area that can meet your needs. Crown Commercial Service will be adding more suppliers who have been through its procurement process to the tool over the coming weeks, once they have demonstrated their robust assurance processes.

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Frameworks

The complete suite of management and business consultancy frameworks Business, procurement, supply chain and commercial, complex and transformation and strategic consultancy options are all now available following the launch of the Management Consultancy Framework Two on 4 September Launched on 4 September and worth All suppliers will share their knowledge £2.3 billion, Management Consultancy with users as part of their contract, meaning Framework 2 (MCF2) provides advice on you can build your organisation’s future business consultancy, strategic, complex and capability, with choice highlighted as a key transformation issues, and procurement, component of the agreements. There is a supply chain and commercial matters, wide range of suppliers from SMEs supplying a compliant, cost effective to large multinationals, way for central government and the sector based and the wider public sector lots give access to There to access a variety of a broad range of consultancy advice from industry experts. is value for a range of suppliers. money Crown Commercial Scope with m guaranteed, Service’s management Following on a x i m um rate capped consultancy from the nons frameworks offer award of Lot the framfor the life of users the benefits 1 of RM3745 e w further ork and of assurance and Management c o m recomm petition th ease of access, as all Consultancy e ended suppliers are Cyber Framework w e a nsure b Essentials accredited (MCF), MCF2 est valu y to and the department has been launched e provides a selection tool to to provide both the help quickly shortlist suitable wider public sector suppliers and a comprehensive and central government guidance and templates to make getting access to a wider range of started as straightforward as possible. business consultancy advice and delivery. On top of this, there is value for money The framework will contain four lots: guaranteed, with maximum rates capped for Lot 1 Business consultancy services; Lot 2 the life of the framework, further competition Procurement, supply chain and commercial the recommended way to ensure best value consultancy services; Lot 3 Complex and and a choice of pricing models including transformation consultancy services; and fixed, risk and reward or time and materials. Lot 4 Strategic consultancy services.

Lot 1, which addresses business consultancy services, comes with an estimated value of £800 million. Suppliers on this lot will be tasked with providing a broad range of business consulting services for both advice and delivery. The second lot is for procurement, supply chain, and commercial consultancy services. It comes with a spending pot of £250 million. Suppliers in this lot will be expected to consult the government on ‘complex commercial procurement transactions, [and] strategic, operational, and dedicated large-scale deployments’. The third lot is worth an estimated £750 million, which addresses complex and transformation consultancy services. Chosen providers in lot three will provide advisory and delivery services related to ‘programmes or portfolios of work across government which are complex, multi-disciplinary, transformational, and large scale’. The final lot is dedicated to strategic consultancy services. CCS said that services are likely to be assignments providing high-level strategic advice to permanent secretaries, ministers, and other senior civil [or] public servants. This lot has an estimated value of £500 million. L FURTHER INFORMATION https://ccs-agreements.cabinetoffice. gov.uk/contracts/rm6008

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implementation we deploy dedicated service resource that will be embedded in your organisation to ensure successful relationship management, strong stakeholder buy-in and immediate trouble shooting to relieve the pressure on your HR and operational teams. Blended Solutions Retinue combines RPO and Managed Services into one integrated solution for temporary staffing and permanent hiring into a single, total talent acquisition approach. This integrated approach offers an array of benefits, including increased flexibility and scalability, greater accountability and compliance, lower hiring costs though better employee utilisation and management and delivers a single transactional touch point. Our blended workforce solution guarantees a cutting-edge approach to talent acquisition and workforce management. We have created an integrated workforce solution that provides you with a single partner ensuring you receive the best of both. Our direct delivery model is aligned with a specialist supply chain to provide all areas of your business with a total talent strategy linked to your business vision. For more information please contact: enquiries@retinue-solutions.com

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Frameworks

Third Digital Outcomes and Specialists framework launches With almost half of all spend through Crown Commercial Service framework agreements going directly to small and medium-sized enterprises, we look at the recently released Digital Outcomes and Specialists 3 Digital Outcomes and Specialists 3 (DOS3) framework opened for business at the start of the month and is perfectly placed to help public sector organisations find suppliers that can buy, design, build, test and deliver software. Solutions available on the framework are: digital outcomes; digital specialists; user research studios; and user research participants. DOS3 is the latest in a line of agreements that is enabling SMEs to reap the benefits of a flourishing Digital Marketplace by accessing almost half of public sector spend on digital, data and technology services. Minister for Implementation Oliver Dowden has reiterated that over £1.9 billiion has been spent with SMEs since 2012, the equivalent of £1.35 out of every £3 spent by government. Thousands of SMEs are now signed up to provide their digital, data and technology services to government, and public bodies are utilising their expertise to drive the UK’s digital transformation. In the last year alone, £1.3 billion has been spent through Digital Marketplace, with £602 million going to SMEs. One example is i-movo Limited, an SME based in Southwark, who won a DWP contract through DOS3 Digital Marketplace. i s a cc The company now t h ro u g e s s e d delivers an online Market h the Digital voucher system 2 0 1 4 b p l a c e , c re a t e to support yC d in benefit claimants Having opened S e r v i c e ro w n C o m m e who are not for applications rc i a l and Go ver nme Digital able to access back in July, n their payments DOS3 will support gover n Service to ma t ment p ke through the bank. new companies e a s i e r a ro c u re m e n t David Tymm, CEO to supply the nd of i-movo said: “The public sector, while t r a n s p a m o re process of joining also giving current re n t and winning through suppliers the opportunity the Digital Marketplace to update their service is straightforward even for offer and pricing. A supplier niche solution providers like us. We list, leaked ahead of CCS opening the worked in partnership with our customer to agreement, revealed that nearly 3,000 firms deliver a solution which supports vulnerable have gained a place on the new iteration of citizens to access government services, and the government digital services framework, which at the same time will enable us to an increase of 935 on the previous version. grow our reputation and our business.” The success of DOS2 was built on creating a Community of Practice, called the digital Digital outcomes and specialists buying community, to help share best According to the Government Digital Service, practice to clearly define problems and this 2,953 suppliers have been awarded places will continue to be built on with DOS3. on the new agreement, 94 per cent of them Niall Quinn, Director Technology Strategic SMEs. Around £500 million has been spent Category at CCS, said: “DOS3 enables hundreds through the framework since its inception, of new suppliers to be able to provide services with over £198 million going to SMEs. to the public sector and further underpins

the government’s work to level the playing field for small and medium-sized businesses. The success of DOS2 was built on creating a Community of Practice to help share best practice to clearly define problems and we will continue to build on this with DOS3.” Dave Draper, managing director of SME Valtech, said: “This latest version of DOS continues to provide the consistency and transparency that SMEs need to engage on a level playing field. The inclusion of data roles represents the acceptance of this critical capability in delivering joined up digital government, something Valtech is passionate about.” DOS3 is accessed through the Digital Marketplace, created in 2014 by Crown Commercial Service and Government Digital Service to make government procurement easier and more transparent. L FURTHER INFORMATION https://ccs-agreements. cabinetoffice.gov.uk/node/7367

Volume 25.5 | GOVERNMENT BUSINESS MAGAZINE

Advertisers Index

SPORTS

AIR QUALITY

The UK’s premier artificial grass manufacturer

Reducing risk of exposure to airborne asbestos

Founded in 2000, the UK division of TigerTurf designs and manufactures artificial turf for sport and landscape applications, and is a major supplier to the European, African and Middle Eastern markets. Thanks to an unrivalled investment in product development, TigerTurf utilises innovative manufacturing processes to develop a comprehensive range of artificial turf which meets a variety of sports and leisure performance standards. TigerTurf selects the most advanced yarns from parent company TenCate – market leader in yarn extrusion – to create a full range of artificial turf for a wealth of sports and education facilities. To support its expansive product range, TigerTurf has a network of highly-skilled construction and design partners, each of

Alert Technology Ltd has developed ‘ALERT’, the world’s first warning device that can distinguish airborne asbestos fibres in real time. Like a sophisticated smoke alarm, ALERT offers a vital first line of defence where none currently exists helping improve living and working environments. Extensive use in over 3,500 products has left the UK with an absestos legacy to deal with for years to come. Asbestos containing materials can be found in private residential, industrial and commercial buildings. Safe if encapsulated and undamaged, asbestos only poses a serious risk when degraded over time or damaged by removal, DIY, remedial work or demolition resulting in toxic respirable fibres being airborne. Asbestos related diseases caused by prolonged exposure can take decades to develop, and are responsible for one in every three occupational cancers – claiming

whom is able to extend the organisation’s industry-leading attention to detail to the installation and maintenance of its artificial turf products. TigerTurf is a FIFA licensed supplier and maintains close affiliations with the FA, World Rugby, RFU, RFL, GAA, and ITF, whilst also having relevant products approved by FIH through the Preferred Supplier status of parent company, TenCate.

FURTHER INFORMATION Tel: 01299 253 966 https://tigerturf.com/uk/

107,000 lives a year globally and 5,000 each year in the UK. The ‘ALERT’ device can help reduce risk by providing a vital early warning when ACMs have been disturbed and fibres released into the air so safety precautions can be taken. ‘ALERT’ sample units are currently engaged in commercial field trials with potential future customers and have recently been awarded an innovation loan from Innovate UK to accelerate market launch in 2019 of the first model, ALERT Pro 1000.

FURTHER INFORMATION Tel: 01803 546262 www.asbestos-alert.com

ADVERTISERS INDEX

The publishers accept no responsibility for errors or omissions in this free service Aecom 27

Dynamic Cassette

Microland 78

Agenda Marketing

Dynistics 58

Momentum3 62

Agenzia 48

Engage Property Technology

Munters OBC

Agilient International

EPI-USE Labs

NIIT Technologies

AJC Retail Solutions

Evan Chair International

Ares Prism

Excelerated Procurement

Organisational Improvement

Augments Group

Ford

Pitney Bowes

Hazardous Safety Products

PushPull Technologies

Azimap 54

Herman Miller

Retinue Solutions

BSRIA 16

Hyde Park Solutions

Schneider Electric

BT Plc

Inciper

Seabright Group

Byd Solutions

Information Age

Stitched 56

Caterpillar 22,23

Innervate Technology

Synel Industries

Centium Software

Intelligent Incite

Tenet Services

Cognisco 72

ISS Mediclean

IFC

The Benenden Healthcare

Cohesive Comms

Itec Connect

The Social Value Portal

Deep 3

KOUNTEQ 77

Tiger Turf

Delladene 54

Land Assembly

UGot Assesment

Daimler 50

Level Global

University College of Estate

Demarq 52

Lockcode 10

Virtual Ivent Limited

Diabolo 44

Lumenia Doo

Wandisco 94

Differentia 60

MDB Service Consulting

Digital Land Solutions

Megger Ltd

Awesome Apps

88, IBC

BUSINESS INFORMATION FOR LOCAL AND CENTRAL GOVERNMENT | www.governmentbusiness.co.uk

Nokia 74

Inciper Inciper

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