Opening Markets
Public Sector markets
The Scottish Government has also funded Tendering for Public Service Contracts. This is a step by step guide to best practice in bidding for, winning and maintaining public sector contracts.
Public Contracts Scotland portal
The Public Contracts Scotland portal gives you free access to contract opportunities in Scotland. This includes contracts with Local Authorities, NHS Scotland, the Scottish Government, Higher and Further Education and Emergency Services. As well as being able to browse the database of available contracts. You can register on the site to receive free e-mail alerts about contracting opportunities in which you have registered an interest.
Community Benefits in Public Procurement
The Scottish Government wants to see the use of and application of Community Benefits in Procurement strengthened across the public sector. Community Benefit clauses can be added to any suitable contract to provide wider social benefit. Typically this is in the form of:-
- Targeted training and recruitment
- Social enterprise and small business development
- Community engagement
For more information on Community Benefit clauses please read the following brief guide or the full guidance published by Scottish Government in February 2008.
A new leaflet "Achieving Community benefits in Public Procurement" was published in May 2010.
BASE Supported Businesses in Scotland brochure
The British Association of Supported Employment (BASE) has published a brochure providing details of Supported Businesses based in Scotland, the products they offer and the services they provide.
It can be accessed by clicking on this link Supported Businesses in Scotland
Opportunities at the Commonwealth Games
The Scottish Government is keen to maximise the social benefit that can be achieved through Commonwealth games contracts. Through the use of community benefit clauses in contracts there will be opportunities for enterprising third sector organisations to deliver contracts and sub-contracts for the Games.
The Aspire to Enterprise programme will work with enterprising third sector organisations that want to develop the skills and understanding required to effectively bid to deliver services at the games.
Public Social Partnerships
The Scottish Government funded a programme to develop 10 public-social-partnerships in Scotland between 2009 and 2011.
These partnerships (known as PSPs for short) build on the Italian concept of co-planning. They take place in three stages
- Third Sector organisations work with public sector purchasers to design a service
- A consortia of third sector organisations deliver the service as a short-term pilot, helping to refine the service as this proceeds to maximise community benefit
- The service, which has therefore been designed using service users and which has been developed to maximise community benefit is then tendered for longer term delivery
Public Social Partnership Guidance
A new guidance document on Public Social Partnerships was launched on 8 July 2011
- this Guidance is the product of a two-year Scottish Government contract to pilot a range of approaches to improving the co-production of public and community services centred around the needs of the user;
- the public-social partnership approach can enable an approach to be tested out prior to full delivery, this ensures appropriate and more efficient delivery;
- the approach provides significant opportunity for Scotland's third sector to play a positive part in shaping and potentially delivering public and community services and to represent to views and needs of service users;
- the Guidance will be of particular help to public sector bodies and partnerships which directly deliver or commission services to be delivered, the guidance offers a range of experiences from the pilot projects in how this model can work best and where joint learning has been effective;
- SG will continue to support the roll-out of the public-social partnership models through a subsequent programme and will continue to invest in the third sector in order to support both a stronger economy and effective reform of public services.
You can access the Public Social Partnership Guidance document using this link
Working in consortia
Enterprising third sector organisations are increasingly looking for opportunities to operate in consortia. A guide to forming consortia, match funded by the Scottish Government, can be accessed here.
The Scottish Government has match funded a guide for the third sector on forming consortia
A summary of the guide on developing consortia can be accessed here
Business models
Social enterprise can grow and learn from each other through replication and franchising. Details about how to do this can be found on this guide written by CEiS and funded by Scottish Government