Band of bothers

Procurement is the flavour of the month. Everyone’s at it: the ODPM, the Housing Corporation, councils, registered social landlords. There are regional centres of procurement excellence and a sort of procurement czar: Tim Byles, the chief executive of Norfolk council.

Once upon a time, procurement used to be common-or-garden “supply”. The term used to be restricted to the purchase of goods and services by an organisation from external sources. These days, it has been extended to embrace the whole business, as in “how do we better procure the services of tenant representatives?”

But the savings in the government’s efficiency review are no joke. Better management and procurement of social housing are supposed to secure more than £800m a year of savings by 2008. That represents the contribution of councils, arm’s-length management organisations and RSLs to the £21bn savings promised by the July comprehensive spending review.

But isn’t that to lump different animals together? ALMOs were supposed to enjoy autonomy, yet the government’s edict will apply uniformly to councils and to arm’s-length bodies.

As for housing associations, the plan puts them firmly in the “public” camp.

Those aspiring RSL chairs and chief executives who assert their autonomy have another think coming. From the point of view of the Treasury, you are public sector, so get down to Procurement for Housing.

This has another implication for RSLs, even though it was voluntarily developed by the National Housing Federation. PfH is mostly about collective procurement. That means RSLs will band together to buy services and supplies. “New partnering arrangements” will apply to new build.

What price the discretion of RSL boards and trustees to run them in the best interests of tenants and communities? The procurement strategy says they ought to be looking over their shoulders for the sake of efficiency savings and think hard about pooling spending with other RSLs.

Associations in group membership stand to lose even more autonomy against group headquarters. Why, it might be asked, have a jumble of separate RSLs anyway? The new regional housing boards might become procurers and, who knows, eventually facilitate – or force – the merger of RSLs, all for the sake of efficiency.

A similar question can be asked about councils. Peter Gershon, the government efficiency adviser, says social care should be procured by regional entities, possibly consortia of councils. Why have so many councils; why not revisit their boundaries?

If the capacity of councillors to exercise discretionary judgment is further reduced by the procurement exercise, the case for the existence of so many multi-purpose elected authorities is surely weakened.

Whichever way you look at it, procurement seems to come with a centralising or at least a regionalising tag. The “new localism” looks like it has had its day. In housing, the questions being posed by the procurement experts are about size, the dispersal of stock and the number of associations.

They aren’t new, by any means, but this autumn they are being raised with the authority of the Treasury behind them.